[TangoTrotFox]

There's something I don't understand about people who think things like this. Let's go for a simple thought experiment. You're sitting down to play a player who is somewhat stronger than you. He plays 1. Nh3 - a quite awful move of which there will be little to no opening theory on simply because it's so bad. How confident are you now about your chances? I think most players are fully aware that even given such awful opening play, the stronger player will still win in chess.

Chess openings are insidious and certainly the reason the vast majority of players never improve. Imagine a player loses in 10 moves. Naturally he's going to blame his opening. The reality is that he lost because he made some massive tactical blunders. But in either case there are two options here. The first is to go look in a database or book and see where he went wrong. The second is to actually begin the long and difficult path towards improvement that begins with hundreds of hours of work in tactical exercises and deep analysis.

It's not hard to see which most players end up picking. And this becomes a recurring process. They lose another game because of tactical mistakes and go look up and see what they should have played and try to memorize that. And they do this over and over and over. And the next thing you know they repeat some mistake they made long ago because they forgot the right move. In the end their rating stagnates, their play never improves, and then go and complain that they just don't have the "talent" to improve. But it's of course complete nonsense. Beginners love to focus on opening traps, but the reality is that opening studies are the trap in and of themselves!