How do you learn openings?

This software doesn't exist, and it would be rather difficult to design, especially if it must cater to various strengths of players.

If you can afford it, some lessons with a chess coach would be a good way to get you started on understanding opening principles, some openings schemes, and answering your questions on the fly.

If you can't, here are two opening books which are rather good at explaining what's going on :

- Winning chess openings : explains and illustrates the opening principles, and gives many examples

- FCO : explains the basic ideas of most openings

Understanding openings is not an easy process, as you have to build the knowledge step by step (especially if you do it by yourself). So try to be patient

However, I concur with many other posters : you don't need much more than the basic opening principles AND the ability to keep your material safe, to play decent opening moves up to 1700 level.

If you have the freeware version of Chessbase (CB Light 2009) you can buy Ebook format opening books, read them, and then in a training mode guess the moves.  Chess Position Trainer is another, different freeware program that will manage a 'flash card' type system and keep track of your progress, adding more moves in increments from the starting position to any depth you want in an opening tree.  If you're good with this stuff you could probably enter an entire tree in one pgn, but I couldn't tell how to do that or how easy or difficult it is.

Disclaimer: I don't advocate memorizing opening variations, it isn't useful at the amateur level.  Learning typical middle games and endgames that arise out of an opening, the plans usually develop, and how they are normally achieved, however, is useful.  I am not a great player, so don't take it from me, any strong player will tell you the same thing.

 I've been playing with Kebu Chess Opening which also uses pgns, they are very easy to work with.

The chessbase with ebooks sounds interesting. I will look into that, thanks.

XxNo..., why don't you try what I suggested? 

a thousand games is a bit too many. the truth is theres no real efficent way for everyone to learn openings. just pick something and play it alot. if you car alot about chess, look into it more. if you dont, just play it and see what happens. its really up to you how to learn openings, theres no one right way to do it.

Well, then do a 100. However, the larger the sample, the more we can "trust" the results. 

its better to play real people than play a computer 100 times in a row. the computer will play the same moves in response. openings are trial and error. if you play and it loses, then pick up a new one; you dont have to play a computer 100 times before you use and opening in a real game.

I said: play an engine to show that openings are more or less irrelevant, not to find out which openings to play. The reason why an engine would be good for this is that it's level of play can be fixed, and so the results will not be distorted by a random variable (the human opponent). 

its not true that openings are irrelvant. i used to play d4 and now i play b4. my rating has gone up about 100 points (my uscf: 200) and my isha (highschool) has gone up by about 200, all since last year. granted, i improved overall, but my opening choice has at times given me huge advantages, and at times presented me with unfortunate weaknesses. for example, i usually lose games when i play the st. george against players greater than my strength. while i am playing, it is aperant that i am losing because the st. george puts black behind in devolpment if defended correctly, which the stronger players use to their advantage. because of my opening choice, the result of my game is decisively altered. as white, when playing b4, many players have no experience with the opening and blunder, at least drop a pawn or losing tempi, early in the game. i am at an immeadite advantage because i played b4 whereas if i played d4 i would not have this advantage. if you play the main lines of e4 or d4 against people, which are common, then i suppose you can be argued that the opening is irrevlant, but that is  not always the case.

I said openings are more or less irrelevant. Please pay attention to my words. Further, I said they are more or less irrelevant at the level of the OP. 

Secondly, NumB..., it's impossible to say if you would have gained as many rating points had you not changed your openings. 

In sum, we need scientific (empirical) evidence to make such claims. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like it (as far as I know). 

 Well, first it would take at least 500 hours, more likely 750 or 1000. How many hours have you put in all your months of learning chess serious? 600? So clearly that is a lot to ask to prove a point.

Second, I will undoubtly do better with whatever openings I use near the end of the test as compared to the beginning because after that many hours of chess I would have hopefully improved a bit. That would skew the results on whether or not learning the openings was helping or simply I was getting better because I had been practicing so much.

Third, I don't own a chess program. When I've used the one on this site the 1300 rating played dumber than any opponent I've played and I beat it easily, the 1600 rating beat my pretty good. So that doesn't really offer a good way of playing a computer at my rating.

I don't doubt that focusing on middle and end game has helped you a lot. But having a coach also helps a lot. S/he can explain to you why moves you've made in the middle and end game were or weren't good and explain other options and why. That is a lot better than playing 100 games against people and analyzing them yourself.

I don't think it is so bad for me to want to learn openings for myself. I was simply asking if people had any good programs that helped with it. I'm not trying to offend others with my desire to learn some openings.

Pick one and play one, best system around. Cigol, openings are clearly relevant to Xxno's 'level of play' because hes past the level where you make random moves. I've read many chess articles, and basically the levels of chess thinking are as follows, lowest to highest: random moves, attempt to hold pieces, basic planning/tactical thinking, advanced planning/tactical thinking (2500+). XxNo is obviousaly attempting to make it to the third level, at which point the opening moves begin to have value in the game. Once you are past the point where you only make moves that won't lose your pieces, and you begin to think about positional and tactical advantages gained by your moves, the opening moves gain greater importance. For example:

Long time ago I tried to memorize openings but my memory is too weak. So, I chose two openings and played them many times.Then, you need to go back in your games and check if you can think of better moves.

The only way to improve is thinking :(

@Numberwan : it strikes me as an example of 'white plays according to opening principles, while black doesn't' rather than 'white knows his book line while black doesn't'

Don't try to learn and study openings , try to learn and study pawn structures.That way you will learn openings , middlegame and even endgame at the same time.It is not my "invention".Botvinik was the first that applied it in his famous school.

    Trying to memorise lines or trying to learn an opening from databases is a huge mistake.You will play moves that you don't understand and reach positions that you can't comprehend,the position will be "equal" or "slightly better" by the book but actually "equal" or "slightly better" is only a position you understand, a position you don't understand is never "equal" or "slightly better" for you.It is always "worst". 

    Right now opening theory seems like mount Everest.That is because you see moves you don't understand , and every move you don't understand confuses you even more.But chess at it's core is a simple game and follows simple rules.So here is one simple rule:

   "To understand an opening you have to understand the basic pawn structures that occur from it"

    That is not even half as difficult as you might imagine.In fact you will be surprised how easy it is.I have seen people  playing opening very good by applying just some simple principles and with basic understanding.By time you will gain a better familiarisation  and a deeper understanding.Opening has to do a lot with familiarisation.You must play the same again and again , you must start to feel the positions that occur like home.Every position ,  must  remind you  something, a mistake, a blunder , a good move, a bad defeat , a good win.All these will increase gradually your understanding of an "opening" and you won't even need to know any lines.Once you understand the pawn structure the "lines" will be automatically in your head. 

          Remember that your ultimate goal is not actually understanding opening but understanding chess.So if you learn, for example, all the lines of French defense you will be still  the same player but if you understand the pawn structures of French defense you will be  a better player.

Mickael, that's very sound advice indeed. I fully agree with you.

If you really want a general opening book get a copy of Fundamental Chess Openings by Van Der Sterren.  The bad news is that I did, spent a bunch of time with it, and saw no real improvement in my game performance as a result.  Lower level players like us will get a vastly greater reward, hour for hour, by doing tactics and a bit of endgame study.  Trying to commit a large repertoire to memory is really something that will benefit a player on the high side of intermediate.

Make sure you have a grip on basic opening priciples.  Control the center, either by occupying it or attacking it.  Get your king to safety.  Develop your pieces quickly.  These basic ideas, along with some tactic skills to avoid traps and sucker punches, will get  you through the opening in lower level games when you go "off book."  If you can get through the opening with an equal share of the center and some sort of plan for play you have done ok.  Despite what the repertoire books claim, games are almost never won or lost in the opening, and if they are its usually because someone blundered. 

I would agree with everyone who said that you should have a opening for white, and as black a plan against e4 and d4.  My suggestion is something along the lines of e5 and d5.  Build up your repertoire organically as you play, learning as you encounter things in games.

Trying to commit a large repertoire to memory is really something that will benefit a player on the high side of intermediate.

Or closer to master level. I (1950ish OTB) recently switched all my openings to something completely different, without any study, and my results actually improved. At my club there's a guy who's been a 2300-ish FM for many years. For a year or three, he decided his opening moves by means of a few dice -- he played 16 possible opening moves (if I remember correctly), randomly, and improvisation from then on. His rating didn't really go up or down during those years, and hasn't changed much since he's back to a normal repertoire either.

But, as Van der Sterren tries to show, they can at least be fun and interesting to learn about...

Well I will say that since I've started looking at openings I've won 9 of my 10 last games. It isn't all that impressive because I had lost so many games before those that I was below 1000 ranking and on my last game the person disconnected after my third move which sucked beause he was using the sicillian and I haven't gotten many chances to play against that yet.

Those wins aren't all because of studying openings. I've been doing tactics training ( I just posted the thread where I showed that I think my tactics are getting better http://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/starting-to-get-better ) and watching different videos along with studying openings pretty much every day. And I won games as black where players opened with b3 and g3 which I hadn't spent much time studying the openings of to know more than a few moves in. But I did know a good general strategy is to block the diagonal they're opening up with a pawn, which also gives you some control of the center, and defending that pawn with a knight. That alone puts me in a decent starting spot to work from and use the tactics and strategy I've learned to continue on.

There have also been games where people played along with the Ruy Lopez which worked out great for me because it is the opening that I've studying/been using the most.

I would say studying openings has certainly helped. Of course I'm still going to run into a lot of moves in the openings I'm not expecting or haven't played before, but that doesn't mean there isn't any gain from studying them.

It is nice that so many people weighed in on this topic too.