Typical manoeuvres

 I tried to generalize the brilliant ideas that I have written down during my study of the French defense. I was quite surprised to notice how fast these brilliancies transposed into trivialities when they are generalized. Like for instance: trade your bad piece for a good piece of your opponent. There are of course important subtleties, like "as long as the pawn structure isn't fixed, you cannot know which piece is good or bad". But knowing positional trivialities is not going to win you much games.

At the same time, I noticed that there are typical manoeuvers that are related to the French. For instance when you try to trade your bad bishop in the French:

Black to move

Black to move

What strikes me is that these manoeuvers are perfectly described by the PoPLoAFun system. You look what the shortest line of attack is from your bad bishop to the good bishop of your opponent, and try to get the upperhand on that line. All standard ways for white to frustrate your access to the target are applicable.

This means that the patterns we must learn to get a clear eye for the lines of attack can greatly be generalized. And those patterns will win you games.

I have made another definite openings choice. Against 1.d4 I'm going to play the Benoni.

That is an opening that is easy to understand too. So now I have three openings of which I understand what I am doing:

• The Colle
• The French Defense
• The Benoni

Remains an answer against 1.c4, 1.Nf3 and 1.g3

For now I use the QID, but I don't quite understand what I'm trying to do there. It looks a bit like a hodgepodge of ideas to me.