best way to study openings

Arctor, after getting a reply like this, I would not even try convincing the kid.  He clearly does not want to listen to obvious good advice from the stronger players.  Let him waste his time studying a phone-book sized opening books until he grows old or eventually realizes that he is being stupid.

 Yes, you would like it to be done by a few months.  But, the reality is that you have to build an opening tree and become proficient with 6 openings of your choosing (3 as White and 3 as Black).  In order to beat someone in any particular opening you have to know that opening better than your opponent.  That doesn't even take into account transpositional possibilities.  Transpositions happen when you are playing an opening of your choosing an your opponent makes a move that transposes to a position in another opening where the color you are playing has an inferior position without you even being aware that this has been done.

There is a system on the internet called Bookup.  It will help you build the opening tree you want.  Bookup is a system that will help you step by step in memorizing the openings you have selected

Once you are proficient in 6 openings (3 as White and 3 as Black) you will have built the "Brick Wall".  It is called the "Brick Wall", because that is what it feels like to anyone rated 1900 or below.

 There are multiple good ways to learn the ideas behind openings, you can go to www.chessbase.com and by a DVD on a certain opening and you will have IM and GM's explaining the ideas behind the openings.  Nigel Davies and Andrew Martin are 2 of my favorites.  An excellent book on the French is "Winning with the French" by Wolfgang Uhlmann, "How to Play the English Opening " by Anatoly Karpov for white is very good.  Personally I have never played the QGD as white or black so I wouldn't know what book to suggest but I think there is a  chessbase dvd for it.

guys guys, i just want a way to memorize it, this isn't suppose to be a rant-festival-debate thing with everyone shouting at each other.

we arnt, we are just saying its best to understand the lines

yeah but i really didn't ask for that. at all. I don't want to be mean but i really don't appreciate the people taking up this forum just for opinions irrelevent to this topic. 

well its not really an opinion, nor is it irrelevant, but a good idea, would be to focus on one or two openings you hope to be proficiant at then when you get good at that move on to the next few

None of this is "irrelevent", nor off topic.  People are allowed to discuss things in forum threads.  But for what you want: read MCO-- not the text, just the columns.  then close the book and write the moves down from memory.  That's one way to memorize stuff.

easylimbo sounds like a spoiled brat who does not appreciate when others are trying to help him.

My advice to him on memorizing lines is: every time you fail at a line you thought you had memorized, run head first into a brick wall - no crying!

"yeah i'm pretty good my uscf rating's 1547" omfg lol!!!  

not a good way to play it though because lets say you study the Spanish Game with 3.f5, and instead your opponent plays d6. huh?!? all of a sudden the position is forieng to you and you are playing from move three where as your opponent may be booked up on 3.d6 and would never concieve of playing 3.f5  so its good to know basic principles in the opening you are studying to understand various defences

Hey Jetfigher13, I think he wants to memorize all the variations.  Afterall what good is memorizing "Ruy Lopez/Spanish: 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5" without memorizing all the variations of the Schliemann, the Classical, the Marshall, etc?  Basically he's spelled out his quest pretty clear, memorize MCO.  (I guess that also means memorizing the +/-s and stuff that give the columns meaning). 

exactly, but he will become robotic, and not play the "better" move when there is a book move to be had

for example in the following game I am reintroducing myself to the Spanish game, and my opponent through a move I had never seen before, but because I have watched enough Spanish opening games I know some of the principles of it, so I had little fear, I am a little lazy to analyse this, so if any of you can please due so. also That knight of f5 was a problem for black. Had it not been there to decapitate his bishop I would have lost

I played as white

if there is a book move, that is the best move...

not always, here is one he could play

Well from what i see so far he is only interested in memorizing the entire MCO which is going to take far more then a couple of months. He refuses to listen to reason and build a solid opening base so what you do with players like this is get then out of book and take him out to deep water and drown them. Oh and by the way USCF 1500 is not that good i'm 1846 and still have periods where i really suck.

in many many positions there are way way more than one book move.  In many openings once you get to a certain point there is no agreement about what is "best".  Black's 4th move in some lines of the Budapest is still being debated.  What's the best move after 5 Bg5 in the Semi-Slav?  It might well be that the best move after 5 Bg5 in the Semi-Slav is to go into a Cambridge Springs Defense.  These questions addressing the ambiguity of "best" are especially relevent in over the board chess or in live chess.  The best move is the one that throws your opponent off.  Besides, you don't always get a book move in response to a book move, and then if you didn't understand idea behind the book move you are not better off having played the book move.  Some GM said this, and it is really true: better to have a bad plan than no plan at all.  Playing book moves simply because they are book moves is no plan at all.  Can you figure out the plan once you're there?  Maybe.  There are way more loses down that path than playing lines you understand and building through understanding.  GMs can play nearly any kind of position equally well, so they can take any kind of theoretical advantage or equality or compensation and work with it.  For anyone else, one man's advantage is another's "where's the beef" moment.  But in any event the impossibly large number of "book" moves, makes your task really tough with a minimal pay off-- and this is coming from someone that knows more about "book moves" and opening lines than I should.

ok ok look i'm sorry, i'll listen. but i've already got a good opening for white and a good one for black aganst e4 and c5. I know about 8 defenses for black from the fourth move. So what should I do now?

Try creating a chess openings database on a website. You have to put all of the individual games on different webpages, so why not just do it.

tactics, endings, middlegame-- exactly what I should be doing.  When you face an opening that stumps you, understanding how you reacted to it is more important than knowing the book moves to it-- because once you understand how you reacted to it you can see how best to play it next time and that goes for non-book moves you face and book moves you're unfamiliar with.  I think most things that stump you will probably be things that transpose into lines you're unfamiliar with (for now).   The 4th move of any opening is pretty shallow water still-- you know that I'm sure.  So, you have to divide your study time on openings between stuff you don't know and deepening you knowledge of what you do know (and that later part is essentially middle game/end game work probably).

I have such a fear over the possiblility that I still owe Rainbow Rising info about the Sveshnikov Variation of the Sicilian that I've till now dare not even find out.