Know your opponent

Understanding your opponent's style and strategy would provide a valuable advantage. One effective way to learn about your opponent is to research their game history, paying particular attention to their preferred openings. Studying these openings and familiarizing yourself with key moves and strategies will give you a significant edge. Let's see how scid can help you.

Let's imagine we are part of Ding Liren's team for the next World Championship match and our responsibility is to prepare the opening for when he plays with white.
We opened a chess database (File -> Open) and created three additional game lists (Windows -> Game List). Then we set four distinct filters (with the filter bar):

• all the games;
• Ding's games played as white;
• Nepo's games played as black;
• recent games between players which have at least 2400 ELO.

Looking at the statistics we see that Ding prefers to start with 1.d4 (123 games) or 1.c4 (52 games).