How to study modern chess openings book?

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Avatar of SAM03051976
Hello, Chess Fans
Hope your doing well. Could you please explain how do I use and make benefit from the modern chess openings book. I don’t think you approach the book by memorization. This is not a healthy learning process.
Thanks in advance.
Avatar of nklristic
samiotaibi wrote:
Hello, Chess Fans
Hope your doing well. Could you please explain how do I use and make benefit from the modern chess openings book. I don’t think you approach the book by memorization. This is not a healthy learning process.
Thanks in advance.

At lower level you shouldn't memorize opening lines at all. When you get much stronger (for instance I am still too weak for that) and serious about chess, you start learning opening lines. There are multiple options for stronger players to do so. One of the most common is to buy Chessbase, an expensive piece of software that helps them analyze games and building opening repertoire. They can use reference books as well. 


Improving players should just stick to opening principles, pick a variation, memorize first 3-5 moves and go from there.

This is most of what we need to know about the opening stage of the game:

https://www.chess.com/blog/nklristic/surviving-the-opening-first-steps-to-chess-improvement

Avatar of ThrillerFan

Like someone said, it is a reference book.  Going further and giving a comparison:

 

ECO, MCO, NCO, FCO.  Think of them as World Book Encyclopedia, Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, and a Thesaurus.  Would you ever read any of those cover to cover?  Also, they are all outdated with this thing called the internet that is now between 25 and 30 years old.

 

Starting Out: The Alekhine, Dismantling the Sicilian, The Even More Flexible French, The Extreme Caro-Kann, Kings Indian Warfare, reading those 5 books would be like reading The Joy Luck Club,  Of Mice and Men, Pet Sematary, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, all books that one would read cover to cover and on vastly different topics and therefore would have vastly different audiences.

Avatar of starmaster1987

Hello Everyone,

These are some free resources, please see below:

https://www.chesspublishing.com/content/

https://lichess.org/video

https://www.365chess.com/opening.php

Best Regards.

Avatar of DasBurner
samiotaibi wrote:
Hello, Chess Fans
Hope your doing well. Could you please explain how do I use and make benefit from the modern chess openings book. I don’t think you approach the book by memorization. This is not a healthy learning process.
Thanks in advance.

I put the lines into a PGN and put my own annotations with the various pawn breaks, dynamics, motifs, evaluation etc of the positions that arise from the lines and copy and paste the PGN in a word document to save

Avatar of oldtimer001

lol when I was young the only chess books i could find in bookstores (or my dad's collection) were game analysis books. and most of them were written by Fred Reinfeld. I never won a game against my dad. Then I found "Modern Chess Strategy" by Edward Lasker. Studying that book for a week took me from never winning a game to winning about 40% with him. I don't know his rank but he played tournaments in the 60's and was probably a slightly above average player.

My point is memorizing or analyzing games played by others taught me little. But learning to think strategically made a huge difference. Also spend half of the time you think about each move looking at the board from the opponents point of view. Try to get a sense of what they are trying to achieve. I'm not a great player, but i am a great deal better than I was before i learned how to learn chess.

Avatar of tygxc

The use of those books is like an encyclopedia: you look up things after you have played a game. You do not read cover to cover.