The average chess player spends too much time on studying opening theory. In his day World
Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker argued that improving amateurs should spend about 5% of their
study time on openings. These days club players are probably closer to 80% often focusing on
opening lines that are popular among grandmasters. Club players shouldn't slavishly copy the
choices of grandmasters. GMs need to squeeze every drop of advantage from the opening and
therefore play highly complex lines that require large amounts of memorization. The main
objective for club players should be to emerge from the opening with a reasonable position
from which you can simply play chess and pit your own tactical and positional understanding
against that of your opponent. Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins recommend the Old
Indian-Hanham Philidor set-up as a basis for both Black and White. They provide ideas and
strategies that can be learned in the shortest possible time require the bare minimum of
maintenance and updating and lead to rock-solid positions that you will know how to handle. By
adopting a similar set-up for both colours with similar plans and techniques you will further
reduce study time. Side-stepping Mainline Theory will help you to focus on what is really
decisive in the vast majority of non-grandmaster games: tactics positional understanding and
endgame technique.
