Approaches to learning chess openings

 As a beginner, I was taught not to care about opening theory. What was important was playing principled, organic chess. I had to find decent moves in the opening without knowing whether or not they were book moves. Chess is, of course, very complex and being able to think independently is what former world champion Dr. Emanuel Lasker always encouraged in his teachings.

In the early stages of my chess journey, I would just experiment with different openings and setups without serious memorization. I would learn the first few moves of the King's Gambit and just play it. I would learn the Queen's Gambit in 3 to 10 minutes and I was ready to play it. So a quick video on YouTube, under 10 minutes, about an opening was enough for me to start playing the opening. I did not care so much about losing rating points by playing openings I did not truly know well.

But there came a point when I had to have an opening repertoire. That's when I had to learn and memorize the moves of variations and subvariations of an opening. I had to be prepared for any moves the opponent would throw my way to try and confuse me. So finally, my opening study was not a quick look at 1 or 2 variations that were 4 to 7 moves in depth. Some lines were as deep as 13 to 17 moves. I believe this was back in 2017 or 2018. I did not play as much chess as I would in the 2020s back then.

So what approach would I take? The initial approach was just to get a chessboard out and replay the moves 3 or 4 times per variation or line. It took a while but it proved to be effective to some extent. I could remember the opening lines relatively well. What I also found more effective than just repeating moves was having mental notes or "idea" notes. I had to keep in mind why certain moves were played. I had to understand what the ideas were. Why is a given exchange good? What typical pawn structures arise, etc. I had to keep track of the semantics and meaning behind certain lines, otherwise remembering them took longer.

Recently, I discovered better methods of remembering openings. In 2025, I tried learning the English Opening and some ideas of how to defend against it. The problem is that the course I was learning from was very long. Repeating the video course would make mastering the response against the English Opening painfully slow. It could take months on end of viewing and repeating the video, especially if I had other obligations in life. There had to be a better and more efficient way to do this.

After thinking about the problem for a while, an idea came to me inspired by a trick I learned back in the 2nd grade at Mountain Rise Primary. My teacher would sometimes call on us to come forward and test our vocabulary using flashcards. What if I could use the same approach to chess? What if, instead of watching the whole video for a given course, I could extract key moments and ideas and turn them into flash cards and review them?

So I tried it several months ago and I was able to learn openings much faster than I previously could. I used the software called Anki to make these cards.

In some cards, I keep track of where on the video or course the given idea is being discussed. This helps me pull up the video and skip to that section quickly if any confusion arises.

There is another approach to memorizing chess moves which requires more skill, however. I consider myself to be a memory expert. I can, on a good day, memorize 80 digits in 1 minute. Just last week as of writing this article, I memorized a deck of cards in just 1 minute.

What if I could create a system that helped chess players remember opening moves, positions and games, I wondered. So I did and tested it with a 35-move game. The system I used worked perfectly. I could remember 35 straight moves with 100% recall. Now that I had a system, I decided to write a book to help other chess players who wish to have deep opening preparation and recall the moves with great depth, fewer repetitions and lower effort. The book is called "Lunikan Chess Memory System: Memorize Chess Moves, Positions and Ideas".

As I had finished the book, I thought about an idea. What if memorizing chess games became a competitive activity? What if players could compete with each other to see how deep they could remember a given game. Maybe it was a game played by computers. What if it was a duel to see which player would get the first move incorrect? I had thoughts of developing a website to help execute this idea. I wonder if this could be done in this lifetime or would it be another one of my entrepreneurial ideas that I quickly forget about.

But I have digressed. What now remains, going forward, is to test out my new ideas to remember openings for deeper courses. I was thinking of getting a Chessable course in the future. Perhaps some time in December or next year. I always had my eye on Sam Shankland's d4 repertoire or Peter Svidler's Grünfeld course. Some of these courses span over 5 hours in video duration. I have never watched a video on a single opening or opening repertoire that long. It provides the perfect opportunity to test out my new pedagogical approaches to learning openings.

What remains is just some follow through and discipline. Of course life can get in the way and my ambitions could be deferred by several months to a year(s). Plans in life are not always ideal and smooth if I have learned anything from life experience. But the short tests that I did test using these new techniques have proven to be effective so far.