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Building a Chess Repertoire: A strategic approach

A great many aspiring chess players are frustrated that they cannot make it into the middle game with any confidence. In fact, promising players even give up the game completely, because of frustrations over their opening results.

Why is that? You only have to look at the chess section of any library or bookstore and you will mainly be confronted with chess openings books.

Openings vary from the Sicilian Dragon to the Monkey's Bum (Really! Its a variation of the Modern Defense). Openings are given such prominence in chess literature, but in reality a player with slightly superior ability should still win as long he simply SURVIVES the opening.

When building a repertoire, your aim is not, at least in the short-term, to become an openings expert. What you are really seeking is to get through the opening stage of the game in a sound position with a clear idea of what to do in the middle game. If you can do that in the majority of your games, you are going to enjoy your chess more with better results.
Therefore, learning by heart a list of opening lines from a theoretical Grandmaster-written book is probably not the most efficient way of going about it; at least for anyone under Master strength.

In their books, Grandmasters usually only consider the best couple of moves in any situation. But, in amateur chess, your opponent could (and usually does) pick from half a dozen moves, not necessarily bad, but which are not considered by those glossy books. Thus, the booked-up' novice is consistently frustrated by his opening play as his opponent keeps taking him out of book'.

TAKE BACK THE INITIATIVE

At one stage, this author was awfully fond of the Exchange Ruy Lopez. He was very knowledgeable on the opening from both sides of the board and was fortunate to be able to play it twice in a single international tournament. Understandably, his chess tutor greeted with horror and disgust his declaration that he was giving up the opening in favor of the Torrent Attack, a rather timid 1.d4 opening.

Why would I do such a thing? Because, I found that most Black players played the Sicilian (1c5) or some other sequence of moves, which left me floundering and highly uncomfortable. The correct answer to those woes lay not in pastures new, but in gaining A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF SELECTED LINES within those other openings.

Let us say, for example, that like myself you are aiming for an Exchange Ruy Lopez as White (1.e4 e5

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