Great project! I would recommend you to study the open games: begin with 1.e4 and answer with 1..e5. Thus concentrate your project on 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 or 3.Bc4 (throw a dice if you does not have a preference). Ignore (in the beginning) that your opponents can play a lot of other stuff like 1..c5 Sicilian or 2..Nf6 Petrof or 1.d4, because your are not making a superluss repertoire but trying to learn chess by learning an opening more deeply.
Remember to make notes of your conclusions, so you can use them (and probably revice them) later on!
Hello, and thank you for taking the time to help me out.
First and foremost, let me address the raised hairs I may have caused in the back of your neck by mentioning openings as a beginner chess player.
I understand that one should start with the basic principles of chess. I did. I understand the importance of the center, of developing my pieces, castling, etc. I'm at the stage where I want to start playing a bit more competitively, instead of just occasionally a friend, or the old man, and to learn alongside my partner, who is also curious about the game.
In order to achieve this, I have been learning about the general principles of the game, but stumbled upon a series of videos that goes through the openings exploring why they are this way or that, and not such and such, addressing matters like principles, strategy, traps, and tactics.
What I would like to do is to use these videos to start learning some starting moves and discussing them with my partner. My vision is that we'd agree to play games where we try to execute an opening to the best of our abilities, and when we get to the point when we forget the moves, we fall back on tactics and general principles. This would, as I see it, give us the best of both worlds: interesting starting games and still plenty of space to learn with our mistakes.
To achieve this, I would like to have a roadmap. Two openings and two defenses to aim towards. This way, we could eventually get to the point where we could expect to have a half decent response to the most common openings from white, queen and king's pawns. I'm envisioning something like starting out with, say, the queen's gambit and the slav defense (just as an example). Play enough games with my partner where we can both execute the moves to a half decent extent. Then some other queen's pawn opening. Then a king's pawn one. And so on.
As you can see, this is a long-term project to get chess into our lives. But I don't presume to be able to memorize every line of every opening ever. So, if you could suggest something for our early stages, it would be very helpful. For example, maybe there's a black defense that works well both against the queen's gambit and some other queen's pawn opening. Then we'd only need one more to deal with king's pawn. As we feel more comfortable with one opening, we could shake things up by playing a game with a different one, so we don't get bored or frustrated, but ideally we'd stick with two, and try to memorize and understand its most common lines. Of course, if we play someone who opens with something else, fall back on general principles.
So, if you think you can help me out, I'd very much appreciate it. Again, thanks for taking the time to read all this.