Grandmaster's Openings Laboratory 2.0 - GM Smirnov

Grandmaster’s Openings Laboratory 2.0

What determines your WIN/LOSS in a chess game? Whether or not you win or lose is determined by your opening preparation, your middlegame skills, and your endgame technique.

At the same time, the opening phase is MORE important because if you don’t play it well, you will lose sooner than you can demonstrate your middlegame/endgame skills.
How do you play an opening properly?
In order to play the opening properly, a lot of people believe that one should just study a lot of opening variations and typical ideas/tricks. Although this is partly correct, there’s actually a HUGE hole here.
The opening stage lasts for 15-20 moves and on every move, both opponents can play around 10 different logical moves. Ultimately this generates many thousands (perhaps millions) of variations. Obviously, there’s no way for us to analyze and remember them all.
NO! You can’t learn it all anyway. If you dig too deep in your opening study, you will not have time for mastering other vitally important skills: calculation, tactics, positional play, etc.
There can be 2 situations in an opening

These 2 situations will happen equally often. Again, let’s be realistic. You can’t learn all possible opening variations; it’s an unworkable hope.

How do you play an opening successfully?
Regarding the 1item – opening variations – there are a lot of existing chess books/DVDs about virtually any opening that you can think of. Some of these tutorials are even pretty good. However, there are still some problems here:

• Studying various opening variations takes a lot of your time.
• As we’ve already discussed, you can’t learn everything anyway.
• Your opponents have access to the same tutorials that you have.
• There are opening tutorials about all possible opening variations, and you don’t know what will work best for YOU.

As for the 2item – the general rules/principles of an opening play – this topic is almost completely missing!
Yes, there are some well-known opening rules like “develop pieces”, “fight for the center” and so on, but these are very basic rules. Even beginners know such ideas and in many positions, it simply cannot help you.
You will NOT realize your FULL chess potential.

You only have two choices: adapt to this trend or be left out frustrated as your chess results rot away and your progress stalled.
Most of the modern openings lead to complex positions where you need to use more advanced rules. Surprisingly, this topic is almost completely missing in the opening tutorials.
In order to help you overcome these difficulties, I’ve created a new opening course “The Grandmaster’s Openings Laboratory”- 2.
What do you need for a successful opening play?

• 1) Powerful Opening Repertoire

We’ve selected the best opening variations, analyzed them, removed unnecessary lines, and prepared training materials that will help you master the given openings gradually.

• 2) The general rules/principles of opening play

It reveals how Grandmasters find correct opening moves while playing a game. I’ll show it to you in a real-time mode using various positions. Then you’ll train it and automate these skills. Thus you’ll be able to implement it in your games right after a study of the course.

A SERIOUS study of the course will take 1-3 months (depending on the amount of time you allocate for chess, and your current chess level).
After that, you will have improved your opening play and will have improved your general chess understanding as well.
It should bring you an increase of 50 rating points for sure. The best students achieve an increase of 100-300 rating points.

Contents:

• LESSON #1:

Opening Knowledge vs. Opening Understanding

You’ll learn 2 main situations that can happen in an opening (playing by memory and finding the moves yourself) and exactly how you should handle them. Using practical examples, we’ll analyze the 5 main mistakes that lead to opening troubles. Through these examples, you’ll learn how to prevent such situations occurring in your games.
“Question of all-times”: which openings should you choose?

• LESSON #2:

How to play an opening?

The 2nd and 3rd lessons are the KEY parts of the course and will provide you with a complete guide for finding proper opening moves in your games. Within this lesson, I’ll reveal to you how Grandmasters think in an opening so that you can do the same.

• LESSON #3

Advanced rules
In this lesson, we’ll deepen your opening understanding. This time we’ll analyze really difficult, complex positions. You’ll learn how to play openings on a Grandmaster level!

• LESSON #4:

Modern opening trends
Due to modern technologies (computer, Internet) and through competition among chess players, opening preparation is rather different nowadays. In this lesson, you’ll learn modern trends that will help you to be on the cutting edge of the best technologies!

• LESSON #5:

Opening Understanding in Action
This is another KEY part of the course. It’s is simply not enough to just know about something. To truly know it you must introduce it into your practical games.
For example, everybody knows about a positional sacrifice. But how often you really use it in your practical games? For most players, the answer is: almost never! Such “knowledge” is completely useless.

GM Igor Smyrnov

Igor Smirnov is a chess Grandmaster, coach, and holder of a Master’s degree in psychology. He’s the founder of the “Remote Chess Academy” company that has helped thousands of students worldwide to improve their results. GM Smirnov has developed lots of chess video lessons, articles, webinars and training courses.