Building an Opening Repertoire for White. Pt1

These repertoire posts will be my interpretation of how a beginner with some knowledge of the game, can take their first steps in serious chess improvement by focusing and organising their efforts by building their individual opening repertoires.

First up I think we have to decide on what we want to achieve from the opening. Do we want to play offbeat openings that may have limited surprise factor or do we want to learn openings that will lead to a constant learning curve and lead to better results once we start playing stronger opponents.

Offbeat openings can often lead to shorter more tactical games with openings such as the Kings Gambit or the Birds Opening, or the Danish Gambit but against stronger players they can often be proved very dangerous for White play. I would therefore suggest that we concentrate on the more standard openings, at least for the first few moves.

Of course, the problem with playing standard openings is that your opponent will no doubt have much more knowledge of the opening that you will, this will diminish over time and of course there are plans we can have to lessen the effect of your opponent being 'booked up'.

Next up, we get to perhaps the most important step, which move to play. I consider that it's very important to concentrate our efforts on one move in hundreds of games, before we consider playing a different one. With that in mind which moves should we consider? Well in my opinion there are 4 choices:

a. 1.e4
b. 1.d4
c. 1.Nf3
d. 1.c4

I'm not going to say which move is better than the other, this will most often come down to personal preference and depend in the main on your past experiences and your individual style of play or even which master you would like to emulate.

It is only now that we have decided which of the 4 moves above we are going to concentrate on, that we can start to build an opening repertoire.

To be cont'd.