How to prepare for an opponent you have never played

The pairings go up at nine in the evening. You get a name, a rating, and roughly forty minutes before you should be asleep. Almost everyone spends that time looking for a refutation, which is the one thing they will not find, and walks into the round tired and no better prepared.

Preparation against a specific person is not opening study. It is scouting. You are not trying to prove something about a position, you are trying to raise the probability that your opponent is uncomfortable, on their own time, in a position they have not thought about recently. That is a much easier target, and it is reachable in forty minutes.

01What preparation can and cannot do

Set expectations correctly or you will waste the whole evening.

• It cannot win the game. Preparation buys you a better starting position and a clock advantage. The other four hours are still chess.
• It cannot produce a refutation. If a genuine refutation of their defence existed, they would have stopped playing it.
• It can make them think early. Twenty minutes spent on move nine is a real, measurable edge that compounds for the rest of the game.
• It can stop you being surprised. Half the value of prep is defensive. Knowing their pet line means you never lose thirty minutes to shock.

02Step one · Find the games

You need somewhere between fifteen and a hundred games. Fewer than fifteen and you are reading noise. More than a hundred and you are researching rather than preparing.

1. 01Search the name in a games databaseRated tournament games are the highest quality evidence, because that is the context you will meet them in. Search by player and the whole record comes back sorted.
2. 02Add their online games if you can find the accountLower quality, much higher volume, and the openings are usually the same. Blitz reveals instincts that classical preparation hides.
3. 03Weight the last two years heavilyA repertoire from four years ago is a different player. If you have to choose, take twenty recent games over eighty old ones.
4. 04Note the eventsHow they play in a team match and how they play in a weekend open are frequently different. Check what kind of event this is.

03Step two · Map the repertoire, quickly

Do not read the games yet. Count them first. You want a small table that tells you what you are likely to face, and you want it in five minutes.

Two useful things fall out immediately. First, you probably only need to prepare one line, because their main choice covers most of the distribution. Second, the small numbers matter more than they look. A defence played twice in eighty games is either an emergency weapon or a line they were experimenting with, and both are worth thirty seconds of thought.

04Step three · Look for the avoidances

This is the part that separates useful preparation from a list of openings, and it is almost never taught.

Scan for positions they entered once and never entered again. People do not abandon lines for no reason. They abandon them after an unpleasant experience, and unpleasant experiences leave a much stronger trace than results do.

1. 01A defence dropped after a single loss. They still remember that loss. The structure still makes them uneasy.
2. 02A move order changed after a specific game. Follow the change back and you will find the game that caused it, and the position they were trying not to reach again.
3. 03A line they only play in fast games. They trust it on instinct and have not checked whether it survives a long think.

Take a player who has played the French for years but stopped allowing the sharpest reply after one bad experience.

This is a far better use of forty minutes than deepening a main line. You are not trying to out prepare them in territory they know. You are steering toward territory they have decided to avoid.

What somebody stopped playing is more informative than what they play.

05Step four · Read the habits, not the moves

Open eight or ten of their games and play through them properly. You are looking for behaviour, and behaviour is remarkably consistent across a career.

• Do they trade or avoid trades? A player who simplifies whenever offered can be provoked into a passive position by keeping the tension. A player who dodges every trade will eventually keep a bad piece too long.
• Which structures recur? Some players reach the same pawn structure from three different openings. That is a preference, and it points directly at the structure they do not want.
• How do they handle an early queen trade? Some strong players are visibly less comfortable without queens and will decline reasonable trades to keep them on.
• What happens after their prep ends? Find their exit move, exactly as you would in your own games, and look at the quality of the next five moves. Some players are stronger once the book ends. Most are not.
• Where does the clock go? If the game record has times, find where they spend it. A player who burns twenty minutes on move eleven is telling you they are uncertain about the position type, not the position.

06Step five · Choose the line

Now decide, with three criteria applied in this order. The order is the important part.

1. 01Do I already know it?Non negotiable. A line learned tonight will not survive tomorrow afternoon. Preparation should mostly select among things you already play, not add to them.
2. 02Have they met it recently?Prefer the line they have faced least in the last two years. Unfamiliarity is the whole product.
3. 03Does it produce a structure they avoid?The tie breaker, and the highest value criterion when the first two are satisfied.

If a candidate fails the first test, discard it however attractive it looks. The most reliable way to lose a prepared game is to play an unfamiliar line correctly for nine moves and then have no idea what to do.

07Step six · Write one page

Preparation you cannot recall at the board is preparation you did not do. Reduce everything to a single page, in this shape:

1. 01What I play, and to move eight only. The exact move order, nothing deeper.
2. 02The three replies I expect, with one sentence each on what I do about them.
3. 03The plan in the resulting middlegame, written as a sentence about pawns rather than a list of moves.
4. 04The one thing I must not do. Usually a natural move that walks into their preferred structure.
5. 05The fallback. What I play if the first move already goes off script, which happens more often than anyone plans for.

Read it once in the morning and once before the round. Do not read it during the game, even if allowed, and do not extend it. A page you know beats five pages you skim.

08Preparing as White is a different job from preparing as Black

This is worth separating, because the same forty minutes should be spent differently depending on which colour you have.

With White

You choose the opening, so preparation is a selection problem. Your opponent has to answer everything you might play, and you only have to answer what they actually do. Spend the time on their defences and on picking the one that gives them the least familiar structure. The strongest move is usually a line you have played for years that happens to be rare in their games.

With Black

You cannot choose, so preparation is a coverage problem. Map what they play, then check your own defence for holes against exactly that. The right question is not "what surprises them", it is "which of my lines am I least sure of, and are they likely to reach it".

One asymmetry is worth exploiting. Players who open with a system, meaning a setup they play against nearly everything, tend to have thin knowledge of the resulting middlegames rather than deep knowledge of a narrow one. Against a system player, preparation is best spent on the middlegame plan rather than on the move order, because the move order will not deviate and the plan is where they are actually beatable.

09The morning of the game

Preparation has a shelf life measured in hours, and how you spend the last few of them matters more than people admit.

• Read the sheet once, early. Not five times, and not in the last ten minutes. Late rereading produces a kind of anxious over precision where you play the prepared move instead of the position.
• Do not add anything. The urge to check one more line on the morning of a game is almost always nerves looking for a job. Nothing found at that point will be remembered correctly.
• Decide in advance what you do if they deviate on move two. It happens constantly, and a player who has already decided loses two minutes rather than twenty.
• Expect the preparation not to appear. Around half the time it simply will not, and that is a normal outcome rather than a wasted evening. The reason to prepare is that the other half is very cheap to win.

The last point is the one that separates players who prepare well from players who prepare hard. Preparation is not an investment in one game, it is a small edge applied repeatedly across a season. Judged one game at a time it will often look useless. Judged across forty games it is one of the highest returns available for the time spent, which is exactly why the forty minute version beats the four hour one: you will actually do it every round.

10The forty minute version

When the pairings come out late, which is always, run this and go to bed.

11When there are no games at all

Often there is nothing to find, especially at club level or against juniors. That is not a wasted evening, it just changes the plan.

• Assume the ordinary. Prepare your own most comfortable line and spend the time refreshing its plans instead.
• Juniors are usually sharper and better prepared than their rating suggests, and usually weaker in slow, structural positions with no immediate contact.
• A returning player is the opposite. Old repertoires, sound understanding, and rusty calculation. Keep pieces on.
• An unrated player is a coin flip. Play the position, not the person, and do not gamble on their being weak.

12What not to bother with

• Novelty hunting. Finding a genuine improvement on move eighteen takes hours and will be sidestepped on move six.
• Deep engine lines. You will not remember them, and the evaluation will not tell you whether the position is playable for a human at 22:40 the night before.
• Preparing against their rating. Ratings describe results, not habits. Two players rated identically can require completely different plans.
• Changing your repertoire the night before. Ever. This is how prepared players lose to unprepared ones.

The same database habits that make this fast are worth learning properly, because the numbers involved are easy to misread: see how to read a chess database. And the lines you steer toward should come from a repertoire that was built to hold up in the first place.