What I Learned Teaching 47 People the Semi-Slav

My new Chessable course on the Semi-Slav is coming out April 21. Along with my course for White on the Reti, and my course for Black against 1. e4 with the Nimzowitsch Sicilian, it will complete a full repertoire for both colors.

This time I decided to try something a little different. Along with the Chessable course, I also ran a live cohort where I taught the Semi-Slav to 47 students in weekly video calls. This gave me a chance to see what was happening in the games of players at a variety of levels, and where they were struggling.

Here are my biggest takeaways:

Black against 1. d4 is tricky

Games starting with 1. d4 have the reputation of being more nuanced than 1. e4 games. This may be true to some extent, but the bigger issue is simply that you get less practice against 1. d4.

At most levels 1. e4 happens in more than 50% of games. The remaining percentage points are split between d4 and other moves like Nf3, c4, etc. This means that if you spend a lot of time learning a complicated defense against 1. d4, you’re unlikely to get to practice it right away. Often, by the time an opponent plays into it, you’ve forgotten much of what you’ve learned. This can lead to a cycle of never retaining much.

One of the best ways to deal with this is to arrange theme games with friends or training partners where you agree to play a certain opening. This way, you are guaranteed practice right away, and you can also discuss the game with your training partner.

Memorization has limited value

Look, I think most people know this already: memorizing long lines is unlikely to help you in real games, because most of your opponents won’t play into them. What I found in the course is that this is even more true than I appreciated. We had a range of students, up to and including some masters, but very few of the practice games I saw followed anything that could be considered theory for more than a few moves.

The core opening principles of controlling the center, developing pieces, and castling are well-known, but even advanced players struggle to follow them in practice. In games between players with online ratings up to 2000, at least one side usually makes a serious error before completing development. This error can take the form of losing material, creating an unnecessary weakness, or wasting time.

As a result, for most players, the opening is a phase you play, not a phase you memorize. For my next course I’m going to incorporate more puzzle-style training where you have to figure out how to exploit a mistake by the opponent.

You need spaced repetition

I have at times recommended spaced repetition as a stopgap: if you struggle to remember the lines, try adding in spaced repetition. But given how effective this technique is, I think it’s worth including it from the get-go.

But wait, doesn’t this contradict the previous point about memorization? No, the key is to be very judicious in what you memorize. It’s worth memorizing a few of the most common lines, but don’t go beyond that unless you really know that more obscure lines are likely to happen in your games.

This is why all my opening courses are 100 Repertoires (100 lines total, much shorter than most opening books or courses). Truthfully, many players could get by for a long time with just the 10 line Quickstarter.

The beauty of spaced repetition is first that it allows you to choose what to remember, and second that it allows you to guarantee you won’t forget something with a very small overall time investment. As my friend Dan Bock says, memorization is low value, but even lower cost.

So be very minimal in what you choose to memorize, but use spaced repetition to ensure you actually remember it.

The blank slate drill is hard

One of my favorite ways to prepare my own opening is the Blank Slate Drill: starting with an empty Lichess Study or Chessbase file, dump in as much as you can remember in 10-30 minutes with no notes or outside resources.

While this drill is extremely effective, it’s also very intimidating for most players. Reconstructing your preparation from scratch is quite difficult unless you’re pretty familiar with the opening. For that reason, I think many students simply skipped this drill.

I would still recommend the Blank Slate Drill to anyone who really wants to dial in their openings: if you can tolerate the discomfort of not remembering some things for 15 minutes, you’ll be better prepared than 99% of your opponents. But I also want to include some gentler drills.

For example, starting from a tabiya (frequent position), list the opponent’s main options and how to react to them. This gives you a firmer base to start from, while still forcing you to remember key details about the opening, and especially what they mean and how they relate to each other, which is key.

Wrapping up

All I have to do to finish the Chessable course is record the videos! The biggest thing I’ll focus on based on the experience of doing the live course is to go for broke explaining everything in excruciating detail. Anybody can hit spacebar with Stockfish to see the best moves, but the real value of an opening course is in the explanations, so I’m going to go all out to explain everything I know about the Semi-Slav.