I’m a little over 1300 elo, and I feel it’s time to start really getting down and dirty and learning openings. I know a little bit about Scandinavian, very little about French and I’ve recently got interested in Ruy Lopez but I wanted to get the opinion of you guys to see where the next step in my chess journey should be?
What’s your kind of style?
I tend to prefer closed, positional style games. I like having my pieces back up other pieces and give a layer of protection in case they’re captured. I very much value pawns and try my best to A: form a strong pawn structure to prevent attack, and B: Disrupt my opponent’s pawn structure as well. If even a good o’ sacrifice or three is necessary. I value mobility of pieces which allows me to outmaneuver my opponents which leads me to often undervalue my queen. I know, I can survive without my queen (most times) but can my opponent?
Sorry if this was long winded, I wanted to give you a good answers.
Perfect: you have pretty much the exact same style as me. In that case I’d very much recommend the Czech Benoni against d4 (hanging pawns has a good video on it). A very positional game plan with less theory and more ideas. Alternatively you could do the king’s Indian, which has much more theory. Against e4 I quite like the pirc (there’s videos on that by Rob Ramirez), which I can also give example games to see the style involved if desired. Finally, with white I really like the colle-zukertort system (Naroditsky and Ramirez have I think both covered it, though I came across it after having seen the colle in a book).
What all these have in common is that there’s relatively little theory required (with the pirc needing the most), and they’re more focussed on ideas – the pawn breaks each is going for, and where on the board you would like to draw focus. I’d be happy to play a couple of rapid games and talk though the ideas if desired (though I’m on lichess rather than chess.com).