Cutting the repertoire down to what I can hold on a Wednesday

For two seasons my preparation was a folder of variations I did not look at and could not recall under a clock. Halving it made me a better player in a way that adding to it never did.

1.The problem was not the openings

I had four first moves as White, chosen on the night according to mood and to whatever I had been reading on the train. Each one came with a thin layer of theory, six or seven moves deep, and under that layer nothing at all. The openings themselves were perfectly respectable. The trouble was that I had no structures in my head, only move orders, and a move order stops helping the moment your opponent plays something reasonable that is not in it.

The symptom was on the scoresheets and I had been looking past it for a year. My first genuinely original move was arriving around move eight or nine, and by then nine or ten minutes had gone on positions I was supposed to know. Two of my three league losses that winter were decided after move thirty in endings I had reached with a quarter of the time my opponent had. Wide preparation had bought me nothing and had quietly sold my clock.

2.What I kept as White

One first move, one setup, and a small number of plans I can describe in words. I play d4 and aim for a quiet formation with Nf3, e3, Bd3 and c4 in whatever order the position allows. It is not ambitious and it does not need to be. What it gives me is the same three or four pawn structures game after game, and because the structures repeat, my middlegame plans are recognition rather than invention. I know which minor piece I want to trade before my opponent has finished developing.

The cost is real and worth naming. Better-prepared opponents get comfortable positions against me without much effort, and roughly once a season somebody plays a line that turns the quiet setup into a dull draw by move twenty. I have decided I would rather have that than four half-learned systems. The plan for the next two seasons is to keep the same setup and deepen one structure a year, starting with the one where I get an isolated pawn, which I have handled badly since I started playing.

3.What I kept as Black

One answer to e4 and one to d4, both chosen for how easy they are to remember rather than for how much I like the resulting positions. Against e4 I play a solid setup with an early e6, which gives me a pawn structure I understand and an endgame I can usually reach. Against d4 I play the same kind of thing, which is not a coincidence: the pawn skeletons overlap enough that a plan learned in one turns up in the other about a third of the time.

Everything else went in a drawer, including two systems I had spent a winter on and was fond of. Fondness turned out to be a poor selection criterion. When I sat down and asked which lines I could reproduce from memory on a Wednesday evening after a day at work, the honest answer covered about a fifth of what was in the folder. The criteria below are the ones I wrote on the first page, and I have not had to change them.

Can I state the plan in one sentence without a board?
Does the structure repeat against at least two different setups?
If my opponent plays the most natural move, am I still at home?
Does it lead to endings I have actually studied?
Could I play it badly and still not be lost by move twenty?

4.Reviewing it twice a year

The review happens in August before the league starts and in January during the break. It takes one evening. I write one page per system by hand, from memory, without opening anything, and then compare that page with the file. Whatever I could not reproduce either gets cut or gets a fortnight of attention, and the decision is made that evening rather than left to drift. In three reviews I have cut two lines, added one, and rewritten the isolated-pawn page twice.

It is a boring ritual and it is the single most useful hour in my chess year. The one thing I have had to watch is the temptation to add after a loss. Losing a game in a line I know is not evidence that I need a new line; it is usually evidence that I played the middlegame badly and would like a distraction. I have started writing the reason for each proposed addition next to it, which kills most of them on the spot.