How do you document your repertoire?

I don't think Mike Leahy's Chess Opening Wizard (re. Bookup) has the ability to create opening keys.  Chessbase's opening keys let you 1) skip along a forced line without having to play through each move as in an opening tree, 2) see a list of games with the continuation of each line, sortable by player name or elo with a single click, 3) generate statistics on how black or white has fared for each move in the key, 4) attach comments to individual moves explaining for instance whether white or black wins or a draw is a natural outcome given best play by both sides.  What really excited me about the announcement for CPT 4 was that the developer was going to include a "variations" feature which sounds to me like it might be similar to the opening keys in Chessbase.

Chess Openings Wizard does have a couple of interesting features.  It will "backsolve" evaluations in centipawns or informant symbols from the end of a line back up to early branches in the variation, giving you some idea of which move may be better in each position.  It can also do batch EPD analysis, assigning an evaluation to the end of each line (the leaf node).  Chess Assistant and Aquarium also can backsolve, and do batch EPD analysis, and CPT can backsolve.  I find this whole process very time-consuming, and I think professional players are more likely to backsolve informally while using Chessbase rather than set COW to work on some archive of games or lines overnight.

COW also backsolves. to be honest i have no idea what it means to create a openingkey. im sure its something useful tho:)

In this day and age, all of this should be web-based.

Gigantic shared opening DB is much better than everybody having their own. The company that does this can charge premium for various update frequencies.

Lease space from someone like Amazon to run the programs. Why is it that PC programs are still popular?

It is portable. It is OS-neutral. It is accessible from anywhere. I would like personally to see chess.com go in this direction.

On a tangentially related note, I think that there's an opportunity to take a lot of existing chess literature to a new level:  A combination of interactive game boards like those here on chess.com and a reader that could render them (like the Kindle perhaps or maybe just an iPhone/Android app) would bring a whole new dimension to studying chess books.

I store my openings in ChessBase which mot opening having one games though certain main lines have two or more games. I go through and create many branches inside each game and try and add good notes from various sources.

I also create database files in for each opening in ChessBase and use the search windows or the reference tab which gives a good tree like break down. I also try and annotate several key games from my main book sources. I also add games from sources such as Chess Publishing and other periodicals.

I am Beta testing Chess Opening Wizard (not the professional version) and am not that impressed. The Professional version (which I think costs around $100) allows back solving. The process of importing annotated games through PGN is such a tree based system is awkward.

If only there were a reader that could do this... #ipad

Right -- I'd forgotten already.

Another web-based idea would be to create a wiki that members could sign in, and update at will.  It would be even cooler if users could add tags such as "sharp," "critical" or "out-of-fashion" to particular lines.  Another killer app or service would be one where you could upload all your games, and it would produce ECO style tables for you.

Wow, actual spreadsheets sounds miserable. These days there's lots of tools. A few months ago, we tried a few of them and just weren't satisfied. We ended up building our own tool that does what a lot of the other ones do. Just in one app. And we also added a bunch of our own features that we personally wanted to see. We've had great success with it so far. Hope you can check it out: Repertree.com

U n c its a 15 year old forum

I'd say don't have a COW MAN, but I do and you should too!

I document mine with a pen on paper. I write it all down. Periodically, I'll take one variation and try to simplify my analysis down to an essential 1 page main line.

I also have a set of postal chess stamps. Critical moves that are anti-intuitive I record as a position and question with the stamps.

I find the writing f lines plus explanations helpful. As Lamport said

"If you think without writing, you only think you're thinking."

-Bill

I personally use chessatlas.net for that, you can organize your repertoire like lichess studies but they make it much easier to train

Before documenting your repertoire, you should play for years. Otherwise you're probably wasting alot of time, since your repertoire is gonna change, and it takes a long time to document much less memorize one. I guess you may learn something along the way, so it's not a total taste. It does force you to think about the coherence of the lines you play. But I'm not sure it's worth the amount of time until you really know how you feel about the lines. Instead, just explore a database carefully and try out many things.
Once you're ready though, just use chessbase.

I’m actually part of the team behind Pawndojo, a repertoire manager and trainer we’ve been building to help players bridge the gap between study and play. ​The core platform—including all the editing and the spaced-repetition training—is completely free and will stay that way. We’re also about to roll out some 'smart features' that analyze your actual games to help grow your repertoire. Instead of just guessing what to study, the tool identifies exactly where you deviated or got stuck in your real-world matches so you can patch those holes immediately. ​We’re keeping these advanced features very low-priced because we want it to be a sustainable but accessible tool for the community. If you give it a try, I’d love to hear your feedback while we're still in this launch phase!