Chess Theory - Opening Theory

Opening Theory

The earliest printed work on chess theory whose date can be established with some exactitude is Repeticion de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez by the Spaniard Luis Ramirez de Lucena, published c. 1497, which included among other things analysis of eleven chess openings. Some of them are known today as the Giuoco Piano, Ruy Lopez, Petroff's Defense, Bishop's Opening, Damiano's Defense, and Scandinavian Defense, though Lucena did not use those terms.

The authorship and date of the Göttingen manuscript are not established, and its publication date is estimated as being somewhere between 1471 and 1505. It is not known whether it or Lucena's book was published first. The manuscript included examples of games with the openings now known as Damiano's Defence, Philidor's Defense, the Giuoco Piano, Petroff's Defense, the Bishop's Opening, the Ruy Lopez, the Ponziani Opening, the Queen's Gambit Accepted, 1.d4 d5 2.Bf4 Bf5 (a form of the London System), Bird's Opening, and the English Opening. Murray observes that it "is no haphazard collection of commencements of games, but is an attempt to deal with the Openings in a systematic way."

Fifteen years after Lucena's book, a Portuguese apothecary, Pedro Damiano, published in Rome the book Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de la partiti (1512). It included analysis of the Queen's Gambit Accepted, showing what happens when Black tries to keep the gambit pawn with ...b5. Damiano's book "was, in contemporary terms, the first bestseller of the modern game." Harry Golombek writes that it "ran through eight editions in the sixteenth century and continued on into the next century with unflagging popularity." Modern players know Damiano primarily because his name is attached to the weak opening Damiano's Defense (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 f6?), although he condemned rather than endorsed it.

These books and later ones discussed games played with various openings, opening traps, and the best way for both sides to play. Certain sequences of opening moves began to be given names, some of the earliest being Damiano's Defense, the King's Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.f4), the Queen's Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4), and the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5).

Damiano's book was followed by general treatises on chess play by Ruy López de Segura (1561), Giulio Cesare Polerio (1590), Gioachino Greco (c. 1625), Joseph Bertin (1735), and François-André Danican Philidor (1749).

The first author to attempt a comprehensive survey of the openings then known was Aaron Alexandre in his 1837 work Encyclopedie des echecs. According to Hooper and Whyld, " Jaenisch produced the first openings analysis on modern lines in his Analyse nouvelle des ouvertures (1842-43)." In 1843, Paul Rudolf von Bilguer published the German Handbuch des Schachspiels, which combined the virtues of Alexandre and Jaenisch's works. The Handbuch, which went through several editions, last being published in several parts in 1912–16, was one of the most important opening references for many decades. The last edition of the Handbuch was edited by Carl Schlechter, who had drawn a match for the World Championship with Emanuel Lasker in 1910. International Master William Hartston called it "a superb work, perhaps the last to encase successfully the whole of chess knowledge within a single volume."

The English master Howard Staunton, perhaps the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851, included over 300 pages of analysis of the openings in his 1847 treatise The Chess Player's Handbook. That work immediately became the standard reference work in English-speaking countries, and was reprinted 21 times by 1935. However, "as time passed a demand arose for more up-to-date works in English". Wilhelm Steinitz, the first World Champion, widely considered the "father of modern chess," extensively analyzed various double king-pawn openings (beginning 1.e4 e5) in his book The Modern Chess Instructor, published in 1889 and 1895. Also in 1889, E. Freeborough and the Reverend C.E. Ranken published the first edition of Chess Openings Ancient and Modern; later editions were published in 1893, 1896, and 1910. In 1911, R.C. Griffith and J.H. White published the first edition of Modern Chess Openings. It is now the longest-published opening treatise in history; the fifteenth edition (commonly called MCO-15), by Grandmaster Nick de Firmian, was published in April 2008.

According to Hooper and Whyld, the various editions of Modern Chess Openings, the last edition of the Handbuch, and the fourth edition of Ludvig Collijn's Larobok (in Swedish), with groundbreaking contributions by Rubinstein, Reti, Spielmann and Nimzowitch "were the popular reference sources for strong players between the two world wars." In 1937-39 former World Champion Max Euwe published a twelve-volume opening treatise, De theorie der schaakopeningen, in Dutch. It was later translated into other languages.

In the late 1930s to early 1950s Reuben Fine, one of the world's strongest players, also become one of its leading theoreticians, publishing important works on the opening, middlegame, and endgame. These began with his revision of Modern Chess Openings, which was published in 1939. In 1943, he published Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, which sought to explain the principles underlying the openings. In 1948, he published his own opening treatise, Practical Chess Openings, a competitor to MCO. In 1964, International Master I.A. Horowitz published the 789-page tome Chess Openings: Theory and Practice, which in addition to opening analysis included a large number of illustrative games.

In 1966, the first volume of Chess Informant was published in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, containing 466 annotated games from the leading chess tournaments and matches of the day. The hugely influential Chess Informant series has revolutionized opening theory. Its great innovation was that it expressed games in languageless figurine algebraic notation and annotated them using no words, but rather seventeen symbols, whose meanings were explained at the beginning of the book in six different languages. This enabled readers around the world to read the same games and annotations, thus greatly accelerating the dissemination of chess ideas and the development of opening theory. The editors of Chess Informant later introduced other publications using the same principle, such as the five-volume Encyclopedia of Chess Openings and Encyclopedia of Chess Endings treatises. Chess Informant was originally published twice a year, and since 1991 has been published thrice annually. Volume 100 was published in 2007. It now uses 57 symbols, explained in 10 languages, to annotate games (see punctuation (chess)), and is available in both print and electronic formats. In 2005, former World Champion Garry Kasparov wrote, "We are all Children of the Informant."

In the 1990s and thereafter, the development of opening theory has been further accelerated by such innovations as extremely strong chess engines such as Fritz and Rybka, software such as ChessBase, and the sale of multi-million-game databases such as ChessBase's Mega 2008 database, with 3.8 million games. Today, the most important openings have been analyzed over 20 moves deep, sometimes well into the endgame, and it is not unusual for leading players to introduce theoretical novelties on move 25 or even later.

Thousands of books have been written on chess openings. These include both comprehensive openings encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings and Modern Chess Openings; general treatises on how to play the opening such as Mastering the Chess Openings (in four volumes), by International Master John L. Watson; and myriad books on specific openings, such as Understanding the Grünfeld and Chess Explained: The Classical Sicilian. "Books and monographs on openings are popular, and as they are thought to become out of date quickly there is a steady supply of new titles." According to Andrew Soltis, "Virtually all the new information about chess since 1930 has been in the opening."