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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been doing well just kind of obliterating all the pawns early on. It seems to open up the board a lot and presents opportunities.

Is there a name for that strategy or maybe it will backfire against better players.

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The worse you are the chess, the more you want to keep pawns on the board since they tactically restrict the game. The more pawns that go off, the more the game opens up into sharp tactical lines which give experienced players an enormous advantage.

All of that leads into my recommendation for getting good at Chess as a beginner: Don't waste any time with opening preparation. Pick two openings you like (one for white, one for black) and stick with them. All your time and effort should go into tactics.

Interesting. n=1 and I’m pretty rubbish at it (just started a few weeks ago), but when playing fellow beginners I find it easier to reduce the total number of pieces on the board (makes it easier to think)

This is just false. Tons and tons of closed positions played by grandmasters.

Grandmasters spend enormous amounts of time doing opening preparation, in some cases creating strategies for and memorizing entire opening lines.

Is that going to help bad/beginner/average players? Not at all, in many ways they're not even playing the same game. Jumping to conclusions based on what Grandmasters do is therefore apt to mislead.

Granted, but saying worse players prefer closed positions is just false. Take the French defense, for example. Advance variation of the French is much harder for beginners compared to the exchange variation. And you can say the same for many other positions.

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