Problem with ICS' French Opening

Hi all,
Just wondering if anyone of you tried the ICS suggested line against French which goes like this: 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. Bd3 c5 5. exd5. From here ICS proposes 5... exd5 as main line and has added 5... Qxd5 as alternative. However when I (playing white of course) tried it, my opponent replied with 5...cxd4 which was not dealt by ICS, so I just 'improvised'.
This leads me to ponder: Is the line against 5...cxd4 too obvious as it was not dealt and not seeing/knowing it is just my fault? I lost the game but I believe it's not because of the improvised line but because of my flawed middle game skills prompted by the shock of opponent's surprise line.

Tha game went like this: http://www.chess.com/livechess/game?id=516567391

1.e4 e6
2.d4 d5
3.Nc3 Bb4
4.Bd3 c5
5.exd5 cxd4
6.dxe6 Bxe6
7.Bb5+ Nc6
8.a3 Ba5
9.b4 Bb6
10.Ne4 Qd5
11.Qd3 Ne7
12.Bf4 O-O
13.Ne2 f5
14.Ng5 Qxg2
15.Rg1 Qd5
16.Nxe6 Qxe6
17.Bc4 Nd5
18.O-O-O Kh8
19.Nxd4 Nxd4
20.c3 Ne2+
21.Qxe2 Qxe2
22.Bxe2 Nxf4
23.Bf3B

I think that white gets an advantage after 5.Bb5+ Bd7, 6.Bxd7 Qxd7, 7.Qxd4.

I'm not really playing the 1.e4 repertoire, but plan to start looking at it after I fininsh the 3-year course next month.

I pretty much failed with the opening repertoire part of ICS, simply because there is no instruction, it's just a heap of moves to try to memorise and I am hopeless at it. I need instruction.

BorgQueen wrote:I pretty much failed with the opening repertoire part of ICS, simply because there is no instruction, it's just a heap of moves to try to memorise and I am hopeless at it. I need instruction.

I think you are refering only to the 1.e4 repertoire for White. The 1.d4 repertoire and the Black repertoire is exceptionally well annotated and better than other repertoire books in my collection. For example, in the game ernestosim01 gives here the ICS addresses the position after 3...Bb4 and explains why it is not considered for the repertoire (against White).

A couple of weeks ago I ported all of the ICS Repertoire into Chess Position Trainer (CPT) to start relearing the repertoire. Because of all the slow correspondence play I've forgotten most of the details in the repertoire and CPT seems to be the best way to get back up to speed quickly. I used to use Chess Opening Wizard, but I don't think is a supported any longer.

I started with the e4 rep for white I believe...

Sounds like a good idea... porting it all into CPT... I just don't know how to do it. Does it still give you the annotations or is it a "drilling machine"?

BorgQueen wrote:

Sounds like a good idea... porting it all into CPT... I just don't know how to do it. Does it still give you the annotations or is it a "drilling machine"?

Just convert the repertoire to pgn, then import into a database. You will have all of the annotations to display. The CPT website has a couple of videos on how to do the import.

What I did was to import the entire repertoire into one database using the ICS opening names (you will have a couple of dozen openings for both black and white). This takes a couple of hours since you will need to import the openings one file at a time, and you will want to edit out some of the example games ICS includes in their chessbase files.

Then comes the part I really like - using that huge database, which is too large to memorize, create a new database (i.e. World Open, London Classic, etc.) and import only the openings you plan to use for that upcoming tournament from the ICS master DB (slav vs dutch, sicilian vs scandinavian etc.). Then edit out any sub-variations you don't choose to use and you are ready to go... This only takes a couple of minutes since you will be importing CPT files.

The modular design of CPT allows you to study the entire repertoire (seeing the transposition), study the individual openings, or drill openings in several different ways.

CPT rocks! I've been 2000+ for 20 yrs...crap openings not need any memorization because...I am lazy. But this is making me better able to play decent openings. Highly recommended!