Hey everyone

i was wondering as to how do you memorize chess openings for when playing chess for example it someone was to play the fischer defense what move should i play?

A common method for memorizing openings lines is to use Chess Opening Wizard, formerly known as Bookup. Chess Position Trainer is a free alternative.

(Of course, unless you're at least 1800, you are completely wasting your time.)

As likesforests said, Bookup is a very nice program for this purpose.

However, your language ("if someone was to play the fischer defense what move should i play?") indicates studying openings is not what you should do to improve. It's like studying differential equations when you can't solve quadratic equations. First learn the basics before doing stuff like memorizing openings.

I agree with Phobetor.  Play and practice.  Learn what works and doesn't.  Find two openings as White and two openings as Black and study these.  Once you finish a game, go over it and see where the critical postion is.  Any opening can be played once, but if you won by luck or your opponent did not know the opening, and you played a bad line, time to retire it and try something else.  Play something that is fun.  Try to play a game, finish it, then see if you can re-play the game without looking at the scoresheet.  That's what you should work on for memory.  Every single master I have ever encountered can turn over a score sheet and re-play his game after it was just played.  They may not be able to do it the next day, but it can be done.  Re-enforce your opening by looking it up in an opening book and prepare an alternative move if you wish to repeat the variation.  The top players don't reveal their best moves unless they have to.  Develop pattern recognition, not memory.  Now I forgot what I was writing about.  Oh, well.

Good grief.  Don't try.  As noted, unless you are at least 1800, don't even try.  Concentrate on tactics and strategy.  You would benefit from using, as much as possible, one or two 'preferred' openings for White and Black.  Over time, as you analyze your games, you will see where you (or your opponent) diverted from known solid lines.  Then you study and try to learn why the non-book move is bad.  Over time, you will learn openings through experience.

The reason that memorization does not work is that there are an endless number of lines and sub-lines for every opening.  Your opponent has a lot to say about what opening you will wind up playing anyway, so you must be flexible.  You have no chance of memorizing even a fraction of the possibilities.  In time, you will learn the openings, and where you took a wrong turn, by analyzing the opening of each game and comparing it to book lines.

Even if you memorize an opening, your oppenent will probably screw up fairly quickly, and then you are back to tactics and strategy because the opening lines are blown.  At 1800+ you have played enough games and studied enough of your openings to simply 'know' openings and most of the main and secondary lines - simply by playing your way up to that level.

Studying your games at least through the opening, up to the point where you or your opponent makes an opening blunder/error is THE best way to learn openings IMO.  Then identify why the mistaken move (yours or his) was flawed and how to gain an advantage.

I haven't read all the comments.  But, I will just say that you will be able to "memorize" openings when you understand the principles and ideas behind them.  If they are just a bunch of random moves memorized then you will forget them or people will deviate and your opening will turn into the closing of the opportunity to win the game. 

Learn the why of every move and you will start to have it stick. 

you should write the move down and read it each time until u have it memorized. sorry thats my best advise

I would urge you to eschew memorization in favour of understanding the themes and ideas behind a particular opening.  Learn a few of the main variations and understand what lines you like through the lens of these themes and ideas so that you can direct the opening to your preferred lines where possible, but also adapt to the unexpected as needed.

If all you do is memorize the lines, as soon as someone puts you out of book you're going to be at a loss unless you understand why you're playing the moves in each line.

Plat 100 gaames with the opening and you will get some understanding. Next download PGN of all of Fisher's games and play them over again so you will get the knack of it.

It is probably more important to understand the ideas behind the various openings than to just blindly memorize certain moves.  In general, you are aiming to develop all your pieces as quickly as possible towards the centre, to put pressure on your opponent's weak points, and induce him to make weakening pawn moves while restricting his own plans.  You might want to take a look at books like Reuben Fine's Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, Gabor Kallai's Basic Chess Openings or Sam Collins' Understanding the Chess Openings.  Understanding Chess Move by Move by John Nunn and the earlier book by Irving Chernev also give detailed explanations of each move.  In the long run, you'll want to learn how to evaluate positions, and decide on your own which move is better of different alternatives.  Kotov talks a bit about how to evaluate in Think Like A Grandmaster.

Fischer's defence is a line in the King's Gambit Accepted 1.e4 e5 2.f4 ef 3.Nf3 d6.  3...d6 is played to keep white's knight out of e5.  The main line runs 4.d4 g5 5.h4 g4 6.Ng1 Bh6 7.Nc3 as played by Nigel Short against Akopian at Madrid 1997.  White occupies the centre while black launches a kingside pawn storm to harass white's king.

One thing that I've noticed with my play over the last few months is that I was using the same opening moves over and over.  I had never seen the opening before but I just started looking at the board and thinking more about the pieces I was using and the opening just sorta appeared and my game has been strengthening ever since.  I've now learned that I'm using a C44 or C45 Scotch Game depending on the variation you look at.  Basically the point that I'm trying to make and the point I believe TheGrobe is making above is that memorizing the opening isn't valuable if you don't know WHY you're making the moves you're making.  In my instance I wasn't interested so much in a particular opening as I was in just working with the pieces and finding ways for them to compliment one another.  The opening kinda fell in to place after that.  I'm a software developer so the best way that I can relate this is in this way.  I can give you all of my source code but unless you have the knowledge and the tools to compile and run it, it doesn't do you any good.  Openings are kinda the same way.  You can memorize and opening but unless you know how to use it effectively, it doesn't really do you much good.

Worry about openings later, first just try to adhere to some principles, control the center, don't make too many pawn moves, develop pieces, and don't move them more then once or twice during the opening without a good reason, don't leave your king in the center if the position is open or is about to open up.

Once you get to 1500+ you can start to worry about openings a bit more, until then learn to develop soundly and learn tactics.

Personally, I think the best thing to do is get together with a friend who plays well and ask him to sit with you and teach you. Offer him a few bucks or dinner in exchange for an afternoon or evening of chess work. I've done this with some friends who wanted to learn openings and I showed them. It's fun and they'll get as much enjoyment out of teaching you as you will learning from them.

I saved this link from another generous member who shared it as a reply to an article - http://www.exeterchessclub.org.uk/Openings/10openrules.html.  I hope it is acceptable here to re-use another's links - I will post this and then try to find the original post to give the person proper attribution.  This link supports the concepts shared about learning the  principles behind the moves.  The original post that shared the link above came from member swestland in this article ...

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-openings/how-i-can-improve-my-opening-knowledge

Another source I found is at www.chesscafe.com in Heisman's Novice Nook and the associated archives to those articles- there are at least four articles on opening principles.