I feel that unless agreed by both players before the game begins you should not be allowed to use openings books to select your move for you. In over the board tournaments you never see Masters browsing through an opening book to see what move they should make. If they are used in general people should just agree a position 16 moves in or so where the book ends. I think there should be a further option for choosing games like what rating range but where you can select opening books allowed or not. Similarly for tournaments. I would rather learn from my many opening mistakes than know relatively nothing about how to play the opening. I would be interested to see what results a poll on this would bring.

Just a little P.S. I think openings books and chess engines are superb tools for analysing a game but to be used after it is finished!!

I definately agree with you, phantom, but with opening databases such as Chess.com's new opening explorer being readily accessable to all players, I doubt there is any way to effectively enforce this rule.

phantomfears> I think there should be a further option for choosing games like what rating range but where you can select opening books allowed or not.

I think it's not necessary to divide opponents by what tools they use, because whatever choices you make (opening books, analysis board, endgame books, time used) your elo rating will eventually settle at the point where you win 50% of your games. Why does it matter to you whether your opponent is a 2000 OTB player using 15sec/move and no opening books or a 1200 OTB player using 2hrs/move and opening books, as long as they both give you a good challenge, and let you play the game the way you want to play it? Divisions would make it more difficult to find a well-matched opponent.

This is not OTB chess. It's not the same and it does not use the same rules. This is correspondence chess. The turn-based system has its own set of rules which is established on the site, and they allow for opening databases and reference material to be used. So the rule is, unless you specifically agree with your opponent not to use those things, it is fair game. Though I rarely use it myself...

The live chess is a different story, that is played much more like OTB, but the Turn-based chess is played by its own set of rules.

if you are really interested in restricting your options in this way then check out the circle of trust group whose members agree to just these restrictions.

for all other games on chess.com then it works the other way round, ie unless you both agree not to use books dbases etc then  you have to accept that it is within the rules for your opponent to use them.