I'm playing a 30 player OTB simul against a master level player soon. I will be black, and he plays d4 very often.
Looking for easy to learn offbeat openings to at least break out of well known opening book stuff and give this guy something to think about that I can rehearse a bit.
bonsai
♡ 80 ( +1 | -1 ) Not easy... He's going to have at least some clue about most reasonable openings. I assume you don't have something non-standard in your normal repertoire (that would really be your best bet, because you would already know the resulting postions and *might* even be more familiar with them than him)? If not maybe you could prepare something like The Vulture (1. d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 Ne4) + The Habichd (1. d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 c5 3.d5 c4), which are quite a surprise without being nonsense. But in general I try to play my usual openings in simuls, because I do know them quite well (and it hasn't work so badly - in the last 3 years I played 5 in simuls against GMs and scored 1.5 points, that's 1 win against Ftacnik and a draw against Wahls - admittedly Ftacnik just blundered in an equal position).
drtimer
♡ 17 ( +1 | -1 ) my humble opinionperhaps try a nimzo-indian defence and try to keep the position as closed as possible, at least he will have to spend sometime thinking/looking.