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Choosing the Right Openings with Black: Structures, Style, and Practical Chess

"adopting an entire grandmaster repertoire is a serious mistake. A very likely consequence is reaching a position where, once your memorized knowledge ends, you will not even know what move to play next."

  • I think it is good to copy an entire grandmaster repertoire, e.g. copy Vachier-Lagrave: Najdorf - Grünfeld - Ruy Lopez. You should then study as many games as you can of your chosen grandmaster, so as to get a grasp of how he handles the resulting middle games and endgames.
"adopting an entire grandmaster repertoire is a serious mistake. A very likely consequence is reaching a position where, once your memorized knowledge ends, you will not even know what move to play next." * I think it is good to copy an entire grandmaster repertoire, e.g. copy Vachier-Lagrave: Najdorf - Grünfeld - Ruy Lopez. You should then study as many games as you can of your chosen grandmaster, so as to get a grasp of how he handles the resulting middle games and endgames.

"One of the most common examples of this flawed approach is combining:
the King’s Indian Defense with the Pirc / Modern Defense,
while assuming that the same setup will work automatically against everything."

  • I believe Pirc - King's Indian Defense - King's Indian Attack is a decent repertoire.
    The ideas and structures are the same or at least similar.
    Black has g6 Bg7 and d6 to contest central squares e5 and d4, and further plans ...Nc6 and ...e5, or ...c6 and ...Qa5 to further fight for control over e5 and d4.
    White has the same plans too: Be3, Qd2, Bh6 to trade off the fianchetto bishop and exploit the weak dark squares left, attack h4, h5 or f4, f5 etc.
    Of course there are differences too: a pawn on c4 or a knight on c3 are not the same.
"One of the most common examples of this flawed approach is combining: the King’s Indian Defense with the Pirc / Modern Defense, while assuming that the same setup will work automatically against everything." * I believe Pirc - King's Indian Defense - King's Indian Attack is a decent repertoire. The ideas and structures are the same or at least similar. Black has g6 Bg7 and d6 to contest central squares e5 and d4, and further plans ...Nc6 and ...e5, or ...c6 and ...Qa5 to further fight for control over e5 and d4. White has the same plans too: Be3, Qd2, Bh6 to trade off the fianchetto bishop and exploit the weak dark squares left, attack h4, h5 or f4, f5 etc. Of course there are differences too: a pawn on c4 or a knight on c3 are not the same.