Good at the Opening? Blasphemy!

I’ve had the good fortune of playing with two 5+ dans recently. Though my game crumbled very quickly in the middle game, I received interesting feedback from both players: I have a good sense of the opening.

To say I was surprised was a bit of an understatement. One of the things I always prided myself in was the willingness to fight and dive into complicated situations. So naturally, I always assumed that the strongest part of my game would be the middle game. Apparently I am wrong. Haha.

Now granted, to those who have studied the game pretty extensively, I’ve heard that being good at the opening is not really something to be proud of since it’s the easiest part of the game to improve because it involves broad strokes of judgment as opposed to complicated sequences. Nonetheless, it was nice to find out that my opening skills are half-way decent.

I guess the only logical next step is to play more games so I can practice my middle game! Haha. Time to go devise a plan to make this a reality…