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Juicing is taking illegal hormones and performance-enhancing drugs. What AOC just said is right, but advanced.
The practice in chess is called opening preparation, and it has been important for centuries. This entire website and enterprise exists only because of it. It is one of the fine traditions enriching chess culture, not a compromising or ethically dubious practice. It is important not to understand it too crudely. Memorization is involved, but it is not as simple as that.
It isn't a matter of extending one's thinking capacity beyond seven moves. Players such as Pillsbury, Reti, Nimzovich, and Botvinnik did opening research to develop and refine whole themes and strategies previously unknown in chess. Ceding White a classical center and kingside advantage in return for a huge mobile pawn mass on the queenside (many lines of the Slav, such as the Tolush gambit, Botvinnik variation, etc.); allowing White to create a massive center only in order to destroy it later and emerge in the cleared position with better-placed pieces (the Gruenfeld); not castling at all when the center is blocked (e.g., the Leningrad Nimzo-Indian); deliberately incurring weaknesses in the belief that the opponent won't be able to spare the moves to exploit them (the Sveshnikov Sicilian): these are some of the fruits of this research. The names of the openings record the rich history of such creative opening research. The main creative ideas endure, although the exact memorized sequences and subordinate ideas evolve over time.
When you study opening theory at home, you must absorb these historical acquisitions while you memorize the moves. Now, AOC was referring to doing additional "home preparation"--doing original investigations and creating additional little pieces of theory of one's own--but you must understand that such 'home-cooked" moves are just little additional pieces of icing on top of a huge memorized historical opening cake. In order to use the icing, first you must own the cake. Accumulating such pieces is the way the mass of opening theory evolved, but each innovation only makes sense against the whole previous background.
Take it all with a grain of salt. Some of the greatest players in history -- Lasker, Capablanca, Carlsen -- dominated even though many of their opponents knew more theory than they did. Traps aside, both opening memorization as a whole and original home preparation only help players who (1)understand with what strategies they should follow up the memorized moves at every point should the opponent jump out of theory (the "ideas behind the openings"), (2) are strong enough to convert into a win the slight advantages they gain with their memorized sequences, and (3) are fairly equal in strength with their opponents. The advantages in question are generally worth less than a pawn and don't exist at all if, once the opponent leaves theory, one doesn't follow the strategies implied by the moves. However, the basis of these strategies--a great part of their content, to one who knows nothing of them--is the general body of valid opening principles, and indeed chess principles as a whole. If you want to understand any of this stuff, home-prepared or not, you need to learn these principles.
The book which you got, by the way, gives the whole package. It explains--in increasing order of importance--the moves of 1.e4 e5 openings, the associated strategic and tactical ideas, and correct general opening principles. When you read it you will personally be reaping the fruits of hundreds of years of home preparation. Enjoy it with a glass of juice and a good conscience.
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Modern Engines and Classic Games (Read 9846 times)
