Juniors and Opening Theory

About a year ago, I posted a game I played against one of the stronger juniors in the local leagues:



I even got some greenpawn analysis, although I wasn't so happy with missing that I could have picked up a knight at the end. Anyway, the thing that got me was the amount of theory we played before having to "think". It was then pointed out that I shouldn't be trying to "out-theory" a junior what with them having sponge-like memories, I should be trying to get them out of theory entirely. Anyway, I played that junior again last night. I can only imagine how much preparation he'd put into those Yugoslav lines this time...



Edit: I know this game appears something like 80 times on chesslive.de, but at least he was out of book!

1) While a kid has massive calculating abilities they tend to overly tunnel vision think compared to an adult- by sidestepping a forcing play and not giving clear targets for a junior to focus on they often wander into worse positions.


2) Players with limited years of experience tend to know the mainlines but haven't accumulated as much practical experience. Pretty much the most dangerous thing you can do is choose some forcing line where the opponent can rattle off 15 moves of theory down to a dead drawn position.