Learning Openings

Hello. I picked up chess recently, and have been loving it. I've been playing and studying as much as I can. One issue I've run into is I don't know how to learn openings. People say focus on learning why you play moves and not just lines, but I can't find any good resources that help with that. The opening I am learning is the Scotch Game. Could anyone help?

youtube is a pretty good resource for openings, you'll get a pretty good overview and most people will explain the ideas.

chess.com also has lessons for openings, but you would need a membership for that.

Hello! If you are looking to learn the scotch game, you could always choose to learn an opening in the lesson area of chess.com. The scotch game is an opening you learn however you may need to wait a week before you get a free opening. (It works that way with lessons, I’m not sure about openings but you can’t do infinite lessons without premium). Which general theory, maybe try playing and not doing the opening as it is but try to focus on the fundamentals at chess. It may be a little confusing, but generally it is develop in the beginning. If you can develop pieces and control
The center, that is the basic of early game. Maybe use the chess.con lessons to learn extra stuff. I think learning chess theory such as how pieces work and how they best move along with experimenting with them would also help. Sorry, I feel like this is kind of vague. Hopefully it helps. When I say theory, it involves using how pieces move to attack the opponent and make your defense stronger. I hope this helps. Other than that, I do not know anything about the scotch game so if this post doesn’t work, try making a few others to get various feedback.

For the membership, I don’t think you need a membership to learn an opening, however you may be limited to 1 a week or something. That is how it works with lessons without premium.

The membership isn’t worth it and their video lessons are next to useless.

I would recommend reviewing opening principles to start, then make effective use of your time afterwards:

https://youtu.be/kURU67G98O8?si=TdzyB3u9-NRAfHto

Openings involve some general principles regardless of which Opening you play.

A) do you have an influence on the center?

B) are you developing your peices to squares that support your position without them being harassed in the process?

C) are you developing your pieces quickly to provide king safety and get your power pieces in to the game? I'm specifically talking about rooks here.

Chess Openings Resources for Beginners and Beyond…

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/openings-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

It cannot hurt to play both colors of an opening, at least until you have it down. Playing white will make ou a better player as Black and vice versa, a wise man once tol me

Correspondence chess is a goo wa to learn an openingm especially thematic correspondence chess, ou can use books and database, can play many games at once, an get lots of decent early middlegame positions, which isz where the real game begins

Learning openings would be mostly a waste of time. The reason you are losing games is that you are making silly mistakes in the middle game. No amount of opening knowledge will help that.

It's a much better idea to look at your games, try to spot the biggest blunders, and try to not do them again.

Example: try the find the 2 worst moves here:

https://www.chess.com/game/live/122717068050?username=legallyabirb

Or the 2 worst moves here:

https://www.chess.com/game/daily/769868429?move=20

Yes opening knowledge is not middle game knowledge. The middle game in my opinion, is one of the most complex parts of the game. Because of the multiple avenues that you and your opponent can steer the game into.

At least with endgames, the peice count and position will always finalize itself into a win, a loss, or a draw. The study of endgames is to get an insight into where the position is going before you get there and not knowingly making decisions that lead down a wrong path.