I have an open question for the chess.com community: how does a beginner slowly develop a stable (and winnable!) opening repertoire? 

I am a beginner and have been trying to advance my game by studying openings. Oddly enough, my playing has gotten worse (sometimes, much worse) whenever I try to implement openings, even when I understand the basic strategies behind the moves.  

 To be more concrete, I've focused on the Ruy Lopez for White and the Sicilian Defense for Black. Much to my surprise and frustration, I find that these classic openings usually leave me in a much worse mess than when I ignorantly concocted random--and rarely repeated--openings of my own. 

 What's going on? How does a beginner develop some solid openings?  

why dont see my post"super opening",u learnt more

The Sicilian is not a good choice for a beginner. The Spanish Game is okay, but the Italian for a beginner is probably better.

 

Playing as white, pick out simple openings that don't require much thought. The exchange variations of most semi-open games (1.e4 and black plays something other than e5) are good. The Spanish game isn't too bad, but there are a lot of variations. The Italian has fewer variations, and is easier to play. The King's Indian Attack and Colle System are openings that don't require theory, but rather understanding of patterns and basic play.

 

As black, go away from the Sicilian, which is very complex. Simpler openings such as the Center-Counter, Italian Game, Queen's Gambit Accepted would be the way to play.  

I suggest playing the open games (e4.e5) as much as possible as these are most classically minded and logical openings.

ericmittens wrote: I suggest playing the open games (e4.e5) as much as possible as these are most classically minded and logical openings.

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 Agreed.In my opinion 1.e4 e5  is the best start for beginners.

I agree with the last two posts. 1.e4 e5 is the simplest opening. Playing 1.e4 e5 you can reach the middle game with a decent position (of course it depends on the level of your opponent)

Anyway I have heard from some good players that the best way to improve in chess is studying endgames.

I wholeheartedly agree that e4 e5 is the way to begin. However, if you're playing online with strangers, you end up playing againsts alot of Sicilian and French that way. I actually abandoned e4 for this reason. The better I got, the more Sicilian as white I had to play, which I really don't enjoy.

Learn opening principles first and then live opening principles. Meaning, you have to be able to play a solid (even stodgy) opening all the way until development is complete, every time, before you start worrying about specific lines.

 

I stopped playing e4 for exactly the same reasons. (I took up the english) Now as I start playing in over-the-board tourneys I'm slowly starting to realize the need to learn the theory necessary to play e4. Aggressiveness is important.

Gentlemen, 

Thank you for all your advice. This is all very good stuff. Just to let you know, I normally open e4 e5. The difficulty is that I've read all the "principles" about opening chess (mobilize your pieces, don't move a piece twice, blah blah), and the odd thing that I've discovered is that if I just play with principles in mind but no specific opening strategy as such, I win much more often than when I try to experiment with, say, the Ruy Lopez or the Sicilian. I've been surprised that my recent study of chess openings has hurt my game rather than helped it. 

 A few points:

1) I like Paintbucket's advice that I study simpler openings. Frankly, I didn't realize that the beginner could get swallowed alive studying and playing the Sicilian. I'll now aim to study one simply open for white (perhaps the Italian) and one simple opening for black.  

 2) I don't want to give anyone the impression that I'm looking for some easy formula to memorize supposedly invincible moves. Orejano is dead-on with his advice and his quotation. I want to understand openings and play them effectively, not just merely memorize them. However, I should start somewhere and perhaps Paintbucket's suggestions would be a good place to begin.  

3) Like Senor Campos, I've heard that endgame study is the best way to improve chess. Perhaps I should think more about that.  

 Thanks for all your help. Any more advice is welcome and deeply appreciated.  

As a beginner, as you stated you were, play open games. 1.e4 is about right and from there there are many to choose from. There's a lot of play in the Italian Game and it should be in your list. What you should not do is pick one and learn extensively. You should only put a lot of work in the opening when your general play picks up, especially the endgame and middle game (mostly tactics).

 But you do need to learn a couple of general openings...

 Pick up 4 or 5 as White (even three is fine if you think that's too much), learn the first four or five moves, and some variations, and most importantly the idea of the opening. You can then base your plans from there.

 As for Black you should have one defense for e4 and one for d4.

 To get a feel for it, play out games which feature your openings. Keep playing your chosen openings. After a game, always analyse your games. You look at where you start getting into trouble. That's when you try to find improvements and look up a database of games or ask somewhere in the forum where you went wrong. Also take note of the tactics and traps that keep occuring in your opening.

When you get used to it, feel free to try out a couple of other variations in the opening.

I find this site very useful for beginner's learning the opening. It also suggests openings suitable for the different grades of players. Good luck!

I think what he wanted to do was advice on developing his opening repertoire. Even beginners have to learn a few openings.

Eric Schiller's First Chess Openings by Cardoza Publishings is an excellent book that covers Bishop's opening for white and simplistic lines for black.  The book itself is only 160 pages total and is written rather well, making for a enjoyable read.  I have used the book in conjunction with tactics training to improve my game over the last five months and am pleased with the results.

What some do for an opening repertoire is simply try and adopt the openings of one of their favorite players. I used to try and play Fischer's openings even as a beginner. I soon realized though that the najdorf sicilian as black for me was far too complex/complicated with too much theory. I had to modify my repertoire to suit me, my strengths and weaknesses and the level of my play at the given time. As white you will need to choose which first move you are going to play and then you will have to learn the popular black defenses to your choice. As black you will need one or two good openings against 1e4 and also 1d4, the English 1c4 is also played regularly. My first repertoire was easy as I chose to play KID against any white opening other than 1e4 and had a main defense against 1e4.

Thematic tournaments are a great way to build opening repertoire: you can pick your tournament, bone up on the opening, and play a slew of games that all feature that opening.  It gives you a great opportunity to investigate the characteristics of the middlegames and endgames that arise from that opening too.  Playing both White and Black in the opening will mean, whichever set of pieces you have in mind to play the opening with, you are heeding the adminition to know what your opponent is thinking!

What do you folks think about the Caro-Kahn for a beginner.  My old chess teacher started me playing that with black, but as I've done some reading, I think his whole position on teaching chess was perhaps a little backwards.  Thoughts?

Zaccheus, there's a book by Bruce Pandolfini called The Winning Way: The How, What and Why of Opening Strategems. I think it might be just what you're looking for. It avoids using the classic labels like "Queen's Gambit", "English Opening," etc., and focuses instead on recognizing the opportunities and power imbalances that emerge within the first few moves. You end up with a solid grounding in openings, but never are you burdened with rote memorizations of moves whose purposes are unclear to you. 

 It's worth checking out. 

Agree with nineofjoker. Eric Schiller's First Chess Openings by Cardoza Publishings was my first openings book. That is a great start.

I think the reasoning may have been that it is a reliable safe system where black doesn't need to know a lot of sharp forcing variations. What I wouldn't recommend is the sicilian, just because it is so big and complex, and something like the pirc or modern, as you really need to know the strategy well as black to stop being trounced on the kingside. I played the modern far too early and could rarely survive against a strong opponent who tore my position apart. Open games are probably the best for a beginner because they advocate lots of step-by-step basics, control of the centre, tactics, etc. If an improving player wanted to build a repertoire I would maybe suggest getting to grips with 1.d4, the queen's gambit is old, respectable, important, and white can choose a system to suit his style, eg. e4 against QGA vs. e3, and so on. One thing that I don't agree with is improving players concentrating on a specialist opening that is advertised in books as amazing, the veresov, tromp, colle, albin, alekhine, modern, and so on. I believe that it is much more important to play major openings first, because they are the ones that will make you improve as a player, and those are the ones which give you the best grounding for strategy and tactics.

My Friend, all the advise above is old method of learning opening.

This is a new and sophisticated method, but of course you have to spend hours in that before you are fluent in opening.

I believe that learning opening is not learning chess, I also believe that it is hard for beginner not to learn opening, because nowadays every people is learning opening, and I believe that chess is 99% tactics.

My method is the method that was used by Roman Dzinziashvilli (i think i was wrong pronouncing his name).

1. Watch some opening video (whatever e4-e5, d5-d5, any repertoir will do because you are just beginner and opening is not the essence of chess improvement for beginer, you only need to start in good shape).

2. After watch it once, try it on internet for about 20 games in a 5-10 minutes game to get a feel about the opening.

3. Watch again the opening video, you will understand better now what the guy in the video is talking about.

4. Play again about 500 games and use Fritz (or whatever engine at least 2400 strength) to analyze your game. Find what is the better move to use the next game you play.

5. Use software -bookup or ChessOpeningWizard or FREE Chess opening trainer, to keep your game database and keep your better move the next time you play. Train with it. Don't cheat using it but train before you play.

6.  Do number 4-5 repeatedly until you reach 1000 blitz game. Now you are a decent opening expert in that opening. Try it OTB.

I got about 200 rating points difference, if my opponent go to my opening preparation (I can beat 2100, while my rating now 1800). But you know there are many openings to complete your repertoir. You have to do other opening also with this method try to concentrate first with white than go to blank defence for 1.e4 then 1.d4 and then other not frequent openings. It will take about two years to have a complete repertoir using this method.

Graw81 wrote: amrou wrote: Anatoly Karpov once said if you want to improve your game , study the endgame !

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 No point in studying the endgame if you cant get to the endgame!!...especially not a winning one. No matter what, every game has an opening phase so it is important to be able to get through it.

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I agree. Nobody wants to get to the middlegame all bruised up, or even worse, destroyed in the opening! Many advice on the openings here are intended to help him get a playable middlegame. We're not underestimating the endgame -- some tough dart player driving to a tournament in a middle of nowhere without a decent map (or lack of any) wouldn't even be able to reach the tournament!