LEARNING THE OPENING CODES
There exists a five volume encyclopedia containing hundreds of thousands of chess openings, which you can buy as a set of books or on disk; not surprisingly, it ' s called The Encyclopedia of Chess Openings( or ECO, for short). Every possible chess opening variation is classified into one of 500 different opening groups, each of which has an alpanumeric designation, such as B12 or C68. The letter refers to which of the five volumes( A through E) the variation appear in, with the number referring to which of that volume ' s one hundred groups( 00 through 99) the variation is sorted into. These alphanumeric designations are referred to as“ ECO codes”.
While I ' m sure that a few brainy mugs know by heart which openings fall into which classifications for all 500 codes, that ' s far beyond the memorization skills of most of us. As time and your chess career go on, you ' ll learn the ECO codes for the openings you most often play, such as( in my case) B21 for the Smith-Morra Gambit or C68 and C69 for the Ruy Lopez Exchange Variation. To look up games by opening from a database( which we ' ll learn about in the next chapter), you ' ll often need to know the ECO code for a particular opening.
But what if you don ' t know it?
Many chess playing programs will display the ECO code somewhere on the screen after you input some opening moves( or, as we ' ve just seen, use the opening tree to step through some moves). For example, after I stepped through those Caro-Kann moves from our example game in Chess King, the program displayed this in a box right above the chess board:
.... which gives me not only the variation ' s ECO code( B19), but also a name for the variation( Classical Variation, Spassky line – named for former world chess champion Boris Spassky).
That ' s a handy trick to know, especially when we get into the next chapter. There are also a number of Internet sites which list ECO codes. By far the best source of these codes( aside from the Encyclopedia itself) is a book by Roy DeVault called Chess Openings Lexicon, which lists the ECO codes and the specific variations they cover, along with the less often used NIC( New in Chess) code for each variation, too.
116 chessking. com