Looking for an effective defence against 1.d4

If you won't study so much theory, experiment by yourself.
If you don't study theory for opening, you're gonna be screw up if your opponents go out of the main line.

I haven't tried this as black, but the Colle-Koltanowski system works very well for white. It is a system, meaning that it can be played in a wide variety of situations. This has two independent advantages for blitz. First, you can easily blitz out your first ten or so moves without much effort. Second, you get lots of opportunities to play it, so you can specialize.

In terms of the system itself, you can achieve a solid d4 (d5) pawn, castle early, a strong bishop on d3 (d6), and can easily push e3-e4 (e6-e5) gaining strong center control.

Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colle_System

Grunfeld is fun

I personally find the budapest defense (1.d4 Nf6, 2 c4 e5, 3 dxe5 Ng5) is a great way to equalize and is easier to play compared to other types of defenses, like the benoni or the nimzo-indian

@benmic:

My opinion is that every novice player should start with 1.d4 d5 and play chess in the old-school way.

With black you are one tempo down and that no reason to go crazy due to that. Just play a careful game and wait for your chance to equalize and finally use some inaccuracies by white to take over the initiative.

I dont think that complicated opening systems like Nimzo or Ben-Oni or Gambits of all kinds are a good idea to play for novice players. They will fail to improve their chess-understanding if they do so. Many beginners like - for example - Kings-Indian-Defence but thats just a mess and I would never give the advice to an beginner to play such complicated hyper-modern stuff.

There is no serious way to win with black easily or without real affort and you just have to accept it. My score with black is better as with white although I play 1.d4 d5 and 1.e4 c6 in every single game.

And I think I am still not strong enough to try such stuff like 1...Nf6/g6 or 1...f5.

Good luck!

Best wishes
Nada

Black resigns after 1.d4 works well for me, I get time to prepare for playing white :)

Chigorin Defense....give a try....

This is what I tend to do:
Control the center with pawns
Develop my king knight
Castle king side
Play asymmetrically (Pieces spaced out like a knight moves.) Example: e4 c5
I plan attacks using 3 chess pieces (An attacker, a helper to protect the attacker, an escape square blocker) Use your army, not just one piece.
Imaging the pieces being guitar strings. If a string is gone, it does not play all the notes. So once you exchange pieces you are already setting up the endgame.

Hey, #12, he asked for a defence... which in chess means the black pieces but you offered a White system so I think that's not what he asked for, unless he also doesn't know what it means.

I also never know what to play against d4 with black, I prefer to play against e4. d5 is what I would recommend, like Nada said I feel everything else can be very complex. If you play against equal opposition (that should be most of your games) I don't think your opponent will have any way to gain a big advantage out of the oppening against something like a Queen's Gambit Accepted.