If you value order and dislike chaos over the board, solid openings are for you. Their job is to give you a firm position with no weaknesses, hard to refute, and to squeeze a small edge out of it patiently.
We have gathered the seven soundest starts, ones that have been in the repertoires of world champions for a century. With them it is hard to lose quickly - and that is half the battle.
Solid does not mean passive. A firm position is the base from which it is convenient to seize the initiative once your opponent overestimates himself. Patience here is a weapon.
Against 1.e4, the Caro-Kann and the Petrov: solid, with no weaknesses and easy to equalise. Against 1.d4, the Slav Defence and the Nimzo-Indian. All of them are proven at the highest level.
Not necessarily. Quiet lines do lead to manoeuvring play, but the position can catch fire at any moment. Solidity gives you a base rather than draining the game of content - even attacking champions value it for one of the colours.
With Black the easiest to master is the Caro-Kann: a structure that makes sense, an active bishop and a minimum of traps. With White, the Queen's Gambit, which teaches the key principles of positional play.
If you are just starting out, have a look at the rules of chess and how to set the board up.
Pairings are computed by bbpPairings, an open-source engine implementing the Dutch system by FIDE rules: score groups, floats on an odd field, colour alternation. Free to use.
Vibe Chess runs chess meetups - networking evenings in cities across Russia: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and more. For companies we run corporate chess tournaments, and every city and format is gathered on the home page.
Open the Vibe Chess app - it has the schedule of meetups and chess events across the cities, the registration and your own tournaments.
