A new way of learning Openings

I used to think learning opening theory was boring and more importantly sufficated my own personal creativity. It was also Inaccessible. Opening up a chess board or setting up the pieces and then going through a variation, then deviating down a rabbit hole of sidelines was exhausting. What was worse, this process had to be repeated over and over if you were to have any hope of memorizing complex lines, which is mandatory in many sharp openings. in a word, learning opening theory is tedious at best. Still, imagine the power you could wield, if you could take just one of those old, giant, tombs of opening theory, a thousand pages of lines and have them in your head. So the point of my post is that I discovered two things recently that has taken my game to another level and I thought I would share my process. my rating in blitz has went from around 1750-1850 to 1950-2000. here is what I did. My first discovery was an app on android called chess repertoire trainer. I am not affiliated with it or Its competitor on google play. I believe you can use it effectively for free and I think the pro version is like 2 dollars. Also if you dont have a phone you can use a program that is free on your computer called blue stacks that simulates a phone. This app let's you create openings and allows you to play through the openings as if you were playing a game of chess. it's amazing. However you still have to put in all the moves of every variation by hand, and if you were to do a whole repertoire like that it could take a long time. my second discovery was that there is a way to get your hands on PGN files to upload directly into chess repertoire trainer to literally take all the work out of the process. One way is to buy opening theory books from forward chess/everyman chess and choose the PGN option. The second option and my favorite is to buy DVD'S from people like simon Williams or Damian lemos and in their dvd files they have the PGN files. also if you have chessbase material, you can save those games as PGN format as well and then upload it directly into chess repertoire. using this system I've easily memorized about 500 -1000 moves. hope this helps!

One needs to check that the material is not a Collection of full games. But your software could have a setting like mine to only learn 15 or so moves in each variation and no 60 move games.

@die_schanze in the chess repertoire trainer after you upload your pgn files and click the train buttion there is an option at the bottom called "interval " . the first number is what move to start training on and the second is how deeply you want to go.

There is also Chessable. You can use free repertoire or purchase them. They are based on spaced repetition and you can ask the author or students about moves or plans.

Your results are good. Nonetheless, I find that other strong players tend to advise lower-rated players like myself to do what you originally did— play through lines and explore rabbit holes very thoroughly over the board in order to better understand the nuances of an opening or other position, rather than memorizing lines, which is typically advised against. Your favorable results argue the opposite.

Chess Openings Wizard has been around since the 1980’s, and you can repetitively drill lines in the same manner. For the app, I think you have to make your own moves, and it does not yet support import/export of files yet. For the desktop version, you can import and export pgn’s.