Six weeks with the London System, and why I am stopping
In early May I decided I was wasting too much time on openings and that the sensible thing was to play one solid system with White against everything. The London System is the usual recommendation: d4, Bf4, e3, Nf3, c3, Bd3, Nbd2, and the same shape every game. Six weeks and nineteen rated games later I am going back to 1.e4, and I want to write down why before I forget and try this again.
The results were fine. Nine wins, six losses, four draws, which is about what my rating predicts against the opponents I had. The problem was not the score. It was what the games felt like and what I was learning from them, which was almost nothing.
Against players below my level the London worked as advertised. I got a safe position, they did something loose on move 12 or 15, and I won a pawn and ground it out. Against players at or above my level, the game went one of two ways. Either they knew the standard antidote, with an early c5 and Qb6 hitting my b2 pawn, and I spent twenty moves slightly worse and passive; or they played something sensible and the position became a slow manoeuvring game where nothing I had learned about the opening mattered after move 10. I drew three of those and lost two, and in none of them did I have an idea of what I was supposed to be doing.
What the six weeks did teach me is that I had misunderstood the point of a system opening. It is not that you avoid studying; it is that you study the middlegame plans instead of the moves, and I had not done that. I knew the first eight moves and nothing about what the bishop on d3 and the knight on e5 are for, or when to play the h-pawn, or how to react when Black plays an early Bf5 and offers to trade my bishop off.
So it is back to e4 and the Italian, where I at least know what the plans are because I have played it for three years. The London goes in the drawer, not the bin. If I pick it up again I will start with a book of annotated middlegames rather than a list of moves, and I will give it six months, not six weeks.