chess openings: scholar vs freestyler
Buy a book on chess openings, study a few, keep them like weapons. They come gambling on gambits, cautious on the queen's side, fucking you up on the fianchetta and assymetrically in the English. People have been studying them for centuries, minutely examining for millenia, honing them to esoteric levels of erudition.
Is this a good thing? Two aesthetics clash: chess as learned art and chess as improvised freestyle logic and innovation. Bobby Fischer invented Fischer Random Chess, where the back row is arranged in a random manner, to free the game from textbook playing, but was he right? To be a great chess player, or even a club player, you must learn the openings, what is a good move in a certain scenario and what isn't, by rote, like times tables. As a fairly shit and lazy player, I glance over a few, just to stimulate me. I hated learning times tables at school.
Is there any particular reason chess must stay in its present form, when it's been through many metamorphoses before? Tradition seems to have frozen it where it can be specialised in. Why do chess players worldwide not adopt Fischer's freeform version? Personally I think it's because of the love of the familiar.
Every player enjoys certain openings in particular, ones they've studied more than the others, their favourite tried and tested techniques. Free up the back row and anything goes, gone is the reassurance of the familar.
Add to, take the piss out of, or point out the glaringly bullshit in, this article