Lord Shplane Posted:

I liked chess until I found out that there were no more original moves, and everything was part of some established set of moves.

So chess is more a game of memorization than anything else. Which sucks.

Nonsense. In our first game, SIG played an unconventional second move, to which I replied with a move that I can’t find in my database, trying to get SIG out of his possible preparation. That’s two moves in and out of book already. At the grandmaster level, the most beautiful games are often decided by straying from the conventional paths and improving on them. A beautiful example of this is Karpov – Kasparov, 1985 World Championship match, game 16 where Kasparov launched the brilliant novelty 8… d5! in a well-known theoretical position, with great effect.