Teaching Opening Principles

We at Academic Chess believe that the opening is an important part of the game. Kids should understand opening principles, but should not be memorizing opening lines and variations. This is strong belief that Academic Chess has, and it is counter to most other scholastic chess schools.

How did the focus on memorizing opening moves become so popular in scholastic chess?

1. Grand Masters (the top players in
2. the world) must memorize opening moves to stay competitive. They spend hours a day just playing through the latest variations and use elaborate chess database programs just to keep current on opening theory. This is because at this level, every little advantage helps a lot, and every person they are playing is also "booked up" so their efforts are definately not wasted.
3. Amateur players in chess (any non-titled player) immitate professional players. They emphasize opening memorization, and do not put enough attention on critical middlegame and endgame skills. Professional players often make fun of young amateur players who have wasted hundred's of hours getting "booked up" but have not the fundamental understanding of the game to break the master threshold.
4. These amateur players make up most of the coaching scene. Because opening study is what they are into, they will oftentimes teach opening lines they have already memorized because this is what interests them.

This is why we believe against opening memorization:

1. Young (k-8) kids are fundamentally bad at memorizing moves. They are like sponges with concepts but bad at memorizing. It is like banging your head against a wall just to get even the best playing young child to remember just a few variations 10 moves deep. Serious opening study involves the memorizing of 100s of variations 20 moves deep. This kind of study is senseless for kids..
2. Memorizing moves is the least interesting part of studying chess. Bobby Fischer suggested changing the knight and bishop around in the opening set up just to thwart all the years of just memorized variations which he thought dulled the game of chess.
3. Memorizing moves is not as beneficial to mind building for kids as the other parts of chess.
4. Chess Talent, and the beautiful parts of the game, are all hidden away in opposite corners as memorization
5. Even if your child manages to memorize 20 moves deep in every variation, 99% chance his opponent is not going to play according to plan, and thus wasting all that effort.
6. Most important is to know how to punish bad opening move. Again, kids should understand opening principles so that they play good moves and punish bad moves in the opening.