My opponent is a lot stronger. What should I do?
It’s one of the questions I get asked a lot. Most of the times we face players close to our rating and playing strength. But, occasionally, especially in large Swiss style events, or in team competitions, the opponent could be rated 3-400 points higher.
Maybe you are rated 1600 and your opponent is 2000. Or you are 2000 and the opponent is 2400. When the difference is that large, you are a huge underdog. Most likely, your opponent is better than you are in every aspect of the game, and is going to win most of the times, no matter what you do. However, upsets happen, and it’s quite instructive to go through such games (I’ve done that a lot). The main thing that such games show is that our intuitions regarding the right approach are completely wrong.
No, you should not avoid theory!
Most players believe that it’s best to get “out of book” as early as possible, because the opponent has a much deeper opening knowledge. It seems to make sense, since even if you play your main repertoire lines, the other guy will probably know a little more. Maybe your knowledge ends at move 10, and his ends at move 13. So let’s do something weird at move 3, and the opponent will lose that opening edge. Right?
Wrong! There are at least 2 reasons why this strategy fails.
The first one is that in a completely unknown position, the much stronger players will usually find better plans, they will still find some features of the position to be familiar, they will be able to find transpositions to systems they know, sometimes with a gain of tempo, and so on. I can tell from my personal experience facing players rated much lower, than nothing makes me happier than a completely unknown position. The point is made very clear in Fischer Random chess (chess 960), where the top world class players are ahead of the field even more than in standard classical chess.
The second reason is how much “room” left there is to outplay the opponent. If the lower rated player goes for a well established book line, all those moves are very good, engine approved, and they lead to positions that are very close to equal. So, the actual fight begins at move 15 (let’s say), in an equal and sometimes simplified position. The higher rated player has to be very creative and very accurate in late middlegame or endgame to outplay their opponent. If they are both out of book at move 5, there is a lot more room and more ways to outplay the weaker player.
No, you should not play a quiet/safe position!
An even more common misconception is that the right strategy is to play a very solid/safe position, with little to no tactical play, because the other guy is so much better at calculating variations in complicated games. That is true, but the other guy is also a lot better in quiet positions. Superior understanding of pawn structures, plans, long term strategies, endgame technique – all of those factors make such “dry” positions difficult to hold against a player rated 3-400 points higher.
Sharp, tactical battles, have a “randomness factor” embedded into them. The higher rated player could calculate 2 moves deeper than you can, but he could be simply unlucky, as very soon after that you get to play a lucky shot (that was almost impossible to foresee). Almost every time I go through one of the big upset games, the picture is that of some sort of wild battle. I don’t see games where the weaker player slowly outplayed their opponent in a quiet game, it simply does not happen. Even if we take the very few games lost by Magnus Carlsen to players below 2600, we see exactly the same thing – some kind of tactical fight, sometimes an irrational position, where the lower rated guy just “happened” to have some unexpected tricks. They didn’t beat Magnus by playing the Carlsbad pawn structure better than him, or by outplaying him from an equal rook endgame.
I am going to illustrate the above points with 3 of my own games. I have decided to pick games that had some meaning at the time – my first victory against a national master, then first win against an international master, and against an international grandmaster. In each of those games I was outrated by hundreds of points.