How do you actually study openings effectively?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to improve the way I study chess openings and I'd like some advice on the best approach.

Whenever I've tried studying openings in the past, I usually end up memorizing a few lines, then gradually forgetting them later. Most of my improvement honestly came from simply playing games and occasionally doing puzzles.

I'm currently around 1800 rapid (peak around 1950). My "repertoire" is also kinda weird. I really enjoy hypermodern setups (for example Nimzo-Larsen with White and KID with Black against d4), but I'm not sure whether I'm approaching them correctly. I often find myself lost out of the opening, and I suspect I don't really understand the themes and ideas behind these setups well enough to make them work as intended.

For players around this level or above, what approach to opening study worked best for you? Should I focus more on ideas and plans, model games, building a repertoire, understanding typical middlegames, memorizing critical lines, or something else?

I'd appreciate hearing what actually helped people improve.

Play the man, not the board.

I’ve always looked for openings that psychologically destabilize my opponents.

If you don’t have a great memory, it’s probably better to forget about heavily analyzed mainstream opening theory like some of the openings you mentioned.

Personally, I never studied the Ruy Lopez, the Italian Game, Queen’s Indian, King’s Indian, Sicilian Defense, French Defense, or even 1.d4 on move one. I never studied those openings because I knew my opponents would beat me through pure memorization.

So I developed a strategy of searching for annoying secondary lines that create psychological discomfort for the opponent lines with very little theory, but still completely playable.

I think a player has to trust themselves if they want to improve at chess and stop obsessing over what everyone else says.

Choosing what opening to play is deeply connected to personality and psychology. And it’s not the same choosing an opening for blitz, bullet, or a classical 2-hour game.

Your approach to the game can’t be the same across different time controls, so your openings shouldn’t be the same either.

The real question is: are you good at memorizing? Are you good at understanding positions? Are you more strategic or more tactical?

A player’s ultimate goal should be to become “universal” strong both in attack and defense. That’s why the same player can use something like the Caro-Kann and the Latvian Gambit depending on the time format, the approach, the strategy… while still expressing the same personality through both.

Its much more effective if you study the plans in the position. This means how you should position your pieces and why. If you understand the why you dont need to memorize lines.

To study effective openings you need a very good teacher. Because the most books are trash. But I can give u some advice for free. Good opening books are:

1.) "Amateur vs Master" by Max Euwe (there are two further books but the first is the best) It sound weird but actually its an opening book. Many books by Max Euwe are very good. Euwe was an expert in opening knowledge. And everything he knew is correct until today.

2.) "The hypermodern Game of Chess" by Tartakower. This book is 100 hundred years old. But I doubt u will find a modern book that has so much informations about the openings like in this book.

Of course there are many good videos on Youtube. For example by GM Igor Smirnov (Remote Chess Academy). But all this is not the most effective way. The most effective way is to have a very good coach. I would recommend to play all openings. Does not matter if you like it or not. Because u will learn from every opening something you can use in your overall game.

Speaking as one with 31 years experience, there are many factors to keep in mind.

1) "Pure" style. Before I even knew what an opening was, I was playing blitz games in college. Someone mentioned the "Queen's Gambit", but most played it 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.Qxa4+ and 4.Qxc4. I probably played 200 blitz games just knowing concepts like controlling the center and castling. After 4 months, I asked if a particular setup had a name. I was told "Yes, it is the French Defense." To this day, I have had more success playing the French than any other openings, constantly scrambling for answers against d4 and as White. I ultimately play the Trompowsky and Veresov with White and the French and Petroff against e4 and Mexican against d4.

2) Get a board and pieces at a table, not a screen. Start with Black first. You need to study a defense to e4 and a defense to d4. They should mesh based on type of game you prefer. You like the blocked center? French and Kings Indian (or certain lines of the Nimzo or Mexican). You like an opening center? Petroff or Berlin and QGA. You like a static center? Ruy Lopez w/ 3...a6 and QGD. You like facing the big mobile center? Alekhine and Grunfeld.

3) You need to invest in as much material as possible. I have probably read about 20 French books. You cannot pigeon hole yourself to a single repertoire-driven book. This is how people fall into the memorization trap. They look for some narrow suggestion and try to memorize it. You need to UNDERSTAND the opening, not memorize it. Nobody is going to spoon feed you everything you need to know. You need to study multiple lines. Get perspective from different authors. Etc. If you study the opening properly, you should be able to play it from either side. Does not mean you will, but should be able to. If you can't, you haven't truly studied the opening properly. And remember, no matter what your repertoire, there will always be at minimum 1 opening you must be able to play from both sides. My repertoire requires 2 - French and Trompowsky. As recent as within the last 3 months, I have had at least 4 Frenches as White and a Trompowsky with Black.

When Studying White, if it is an offbeat opening like 1.b3 or 1.b4, you need to understand it in full like you do the openings you play the Black side of. If it is 1.e4, 1.d4, 1.c4, or 1.Nf3, you need responses to all defenses that mesh well together. Like myself, Tromp and Veresov. 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5, if 2...d5, then 3.Nc3 - no need to learn another line and 2...d5 is the hardest to Crack anyway. 1.d4 e6 2.e4. 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bg5, if 3...e6, then 4.e4!. If 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 e6, 3.e4!. If 1.d4 e6, 2.e4! You get the gist?

This will take you multiple years. If your expectations are to succeed in a few hours, you are dreaming.

You also need to play in over the board events and realize you will start off with some rough patches. You learn a lot more from your losses than you do your wins.

At that level it's really time to begin studying concrete lines. If you don't, your opponents will and you're going to be lost out of the opening more often than not, that's just the reality. You must create an annotated game for your move tree. For this, you need some software. I use chessbase for it. In the beginning, I create a "master move tree" that goes 5-6 moves deep. This is an overview of the full repertoire. It takes me about a day to do this.
After that, I create an annotated game for each variation. I'll end up with... around 40-80, it depends.
Before you invest time in deeply studying a repertoire, you should have experimented with a variety of openings so that you understand what line you want to play long term, and you've cultivated the ability to analyze the opening. Because it takes alot of time to flesh out a repertoire, too much to waste. If you don't yet know for certain which line you want to play long term, keep experimenting with different lines until you know. This experimentation is more shallow - you might just watch a few YT videos, develop an overview of the repertoire 6 moves deep and play the positions, see how they feel for a month. You can play a repertoire like this, you don't have to know it 10 moves deep. 
This is a very important step... I don't think a person can know what line they want to play until they've "felt" it. It took me years jumping around between 5-6 different openings until I know which one I really wanted to play.

So after you know what you want to play.... as you select moves to flesh out the tree, it's important that you go through the reasoning process yourself, rather than just defaulting to some course recommendation or to whatever the top engine move is. You consider all the features of the position, you look at winrates, you consider what type of game you're looking for, etc.. Furthermore, you must annotate the game as you go along. This involves contemplating why the move is played, contrasting it with other moves in the tree and why they may differ, and writing down the distillation of that rationale in a 1-2 line comment. You should do this for the non-obvious moves. 
Another thing that's important is knowing what moves to focus on responding to. Database statistics inform this. You select a target elo range and time format, and you look at the frequency distribution of your opponents moves in the position. Moves occurring less than n% frequency you should ignore. You'll also need to recognize when a line requires study, and when it just leads to playing natural moves in an equal position, where you can end your analysis. 
The next step is important too - you want to identify the critical lines in your repertoire to study first. Critical lines are sharp and/or common. Some lines you can mostly just "play chess" in. Those are the last ones you study. In chessbase you can create a database to contain all the games pertaining to your repertoire, then go through and rank-order the lines in the database by most to least critical.
If you don't take these steps to mitigate the size of the repertoire, you will never finish it, it's too large.
Usually you'll end up with a dozen or so critical lines. From there, it'll take you a few months or so to go through each and flesh them out ~10 moves deep, annotate them, and study them. 
From here onward, when I encounter a game with one of my prepared openings, if I didn't remember the line I'll go back and review it again / possibly add more comments explaining the part I didn't remember.
Lastly.... save your work somewhere, ideally to the cloud. I have all my work in Github.

I've tried things like courses and books, but I never found them very effective. The most effective ones focused on concepts, but most of them just wind up giving concrete continuations, and that's something you can do better with just an engine and your own thought processes. I would recommend getting an overview of the ideas of the opening at least - YT videos are sufficient for that.

One thing to be careful about. Database statistics are often a farce. People take each move at face value and don't understand the fallacies.

I am not looking at a database right now, and the numbers I am giving are hypothetical. They are made up, and are strictly there to make a point as there are legitimate cases where this is true.

Let's just say, hypothetically, that we are looking at the Eingorin Variation of the French Winawer (7...Kf8 in the data below).

You click on the moves in the database tree - 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 c5 5.a3 Bxc3+ 6.bxc3 Ne7 7.Qg4, and now let's hypothetically say you saw the following:

7...Qc7 - 3418 games, White 40%, Draw 30%, Black 30% - So it scores 45% for Black.

7...Kf8 - 672 games, White 33%, Draw 32%, Black 35% - So it scores 51% for Black. In Moskalenko's book, he advertises that this scores over 50% for Black.

7...O-O - 468 games, White 45%, Draw 35%, Black 20% - So it scores 37.5% for Black.

From here, it looks like 7...Kf8 is a slam dunk! Must be the best line.

But then you go inside, and you see that 8.a4, 8.Nf3, 8.h4, and 8.Qd1, all score great for Black. 8.Qd1 scoring 50% for Black and the other 3 all scoring over 60%. But then you see the following profilactic move 8.Bd2, and that it scores 50% White wins, 30% draws, 20% Black wins. So a line that once scored over 50% for Black suddenly scores only 35% if White plays 8.Bd2! Compare this to 7...Qc7, which only scored 45% overall, but no 8th move by White scores better than 58% (which is 42% for Black). The Eingorin looked so good origi ally, but in reality, it is merely the fact that fewer players played the best move. Maybe this idea didn't come to fruition until the 1990s while others were played in the 1970s. Keeping up with theory is far more valid and important than blindly trusting statistics.

Now which line is best? The Eingorin? Or allowing the Poisoned Pawn?

This is why you must be VERY CAREFUL about Statistics when it comes to openings, and statistics should not be the basis of your choices.

Statistics should be part of the basis for your choices. It's not the only factor, and you always should look deeper to investigate. But regarding your point - you can often address this "hidden refutation" problem by narrowing down the statistics to your target elo range. If 60% of 2200 players fall for a particular trap, the bottom line is you will be winning often in that line, it's a good trap. If only 10% of players play the best move, you don't want a repertoire that's been neutered to address the 10% case. Lethality is an important consideration. Furthermore, even bad lines where you're down significantly, if you study them carefully, can be pulled back.

Online chess is much more probability based then OTB chess, because you never are dealing with targeted preparation. I only play online. If I have a magic coin where I win my bet in 60% cases and lose it 40% of cases, that's a phenomenal coin. It's a free ticket to getting rich.

Even Carlsen and other Super-GMs dont know the lines very deep. But they dont have to because they can play chess very well. Its basically impossible to beat a real good chess player only with opening memorization. A very good player will find ways to give you puzzles in every game if he knows anything or not. Of course to know opening theory is an advantage and it even can win you games but much more important is the ability to play chess. Because nobody can memorize everything.