Chessable Has Brainwashed You

If you are familiar with some of my content, it should be no secret that I am not a big fan of Chessable.

Around a year ago, I created a video called “Chessable is Overrated”, and still stand by most of what I said in that video (I do suggest you watch it, if you haven’t already).

I want to take this newsletter from a different angle, however.

Jobava's Approach to Openings

Recently, I have been looking through many of Jobava’s games, and his approach to openings is fascinating to me.

Many know Jobava for the ‘Jobava London’, but that is really just the tip of the iceberg.

In particular with the Black pieces, I found it fascinating that Jobava would routinely allow himself to get positions which the engine would say is +1, +1.5 etc.

Some examples:

By the way, all these positions shown above are in main-line theoretical positions at around move 5/6, yet I doubt there are any books/courses showing how White should continue from these positions. That is another huge practical advantage in playing this way.

Not only would Jobava take his opponents of book this way, but he would frequently outplay his opponents from those positions and go on to win.

This is completely counter to the mainstream narrative out there that just about every chess opening book, or Chessable course will support.

That is: play for an advantage with White, play for equality with Black.

Furthermore, if you struggle to achieve one of those, just analyze harder with the engine, look at correspondence games etc., until you manage to find a way.

Meanwhile, Jobava seemingly gives zero regard to this widespread dogma, and just does his own thing.

"So, Should I Completely Change my Repertoire?"

I should note, however, that I am not proposing everyone starts playing like Jobava and adopt his style in the opening. What I think is worth noting however, is that there is this alternative style to playing the opening which may not even yield worse results.

(Keep in mind also, Jobava has peaked at around 2700, and is around the 2600s these days. If he can get away with this approach, surely we can too.)

Whether we will admit it or not, most chess players (including myself, up until rather recently) are too close-minded to even consider such a strategy.

We want the computer to give us numbers on a screen, to show us our position is good.

If you have any sort of tournament experience however, you would know that a practical chess game is much more complicated than just numbers.

If you TRULY understand this, you will be liberated.

You will understand that even if things might not go as planned in the opening, you still have the rest of the game to fight back and outplay the opponent.

Thus, disappears the need to neurotically memorize 1000s of useless opening variations.

This might sound simple, but for many of you, it will take reversing years of bad habits of caring too much about the engine evaluation.

Worse Positions

In fact, this brings us to a tangentially related topic - how to approach positions in which one is worse.

I was terrible at this when I was younger, and would frequently fall apart the moment my position had some sort of defect.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this was largely due to my perfectionist attitude towards openings - which meant I would almost always arrive out of the opening with a good position.

However, this also meant I lacked experience in positions where I was worse - leaving me ill equipped to handle those situations when I did fall into them.

Playing more offbeat openings can actually be a great way to gain experience in such worse positions - an extremely underrated aspect of chess.

This change of mindset has certainly made an impact on my opening repertoire recently, having decided to add some more offbeat openings with both the White and Black pieces.

I briefly discussed this in a video I released to Youtube around two weeks ago, so if you’re interested in that, check it out:

Anyhow, I hope that this was thought-provoking (it certainly was for me), and gets you to rethink many of the false beliefs that have been ingrained into your subconscious.

Have a good one.

- Sam