Best way to study a repertoire?

Hi there:

I'm an adult beginner. I want to learn a few openings. I'm thinking Catalan for white (perhaps ambitious, but I'm ok with that) and two for black, covering d4 and e4.

Learning the openings and their offshoots depending on my opponent's moves is hard enough, but when playing games, I don't know if I'll get black or white, and if black, I don't know how they'll open. So, I'm wondering the best way to go about learning all this. I have a few ideas, but I'm open to other suggestions:

1.) Play against the computer, where I have more control, and nail them down one at a time.

2.) Don't try to master the ins and outs of all of them. Learn the first few steps of each and progress simultaneously after nailing down the basics.

3.) Learn one at a time. Play it when I have the opportunity, otherwise, keep playing how I'm playing now until one is well understood, then move on to the next.

Any thoughts, or perhaps other methods?

Youre a 600 blitz and rapid player.  Openings are the last thing you should be wasting time on.   I say this fir a few reasons:

1. Openings do not decide your games.

2. Just memorizing a bunch of moves without any understanding of the "why" behind the moves leads to failure. 

3. What are you going to do when your opponents dont play books moves?

Work on the basics.  Opening principles, not blundering and not missing simple tactics.  But of course, its your time to do with as you want.

Actually, I'm not. I do most of my playing on lichess.

I have no intention of just memorizing moves, and every intention of understanding what I'm doing, which is why I'm questioning learning them all at once.

You lost in 9 moves

https://www.chess.com/game/live/23295712623?username=tortoiseavenger

You lost in 18 moves and the only reason it lasted that long is because your opponent missed a mate in 1

https://www.chess.com/game/live/23290806255?username=tortoiseavenger

You lost in 1 move

https://www.chess.com/game/daily/216719598?username=imbacon

Yep and not sure what that has to do with what the OP is asking?

im jk

What are you rated on lichess?

Neither do your replies. I asked a specific question, not general advice. Openings are something I'm interested in, and I'd like to explore them. While I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you are perhaps trying to help my overall progress by suggesting that my efforts might be misplaced, pointing out how bad I am (in your view) isn't very constructive.

If we could focus more on my question, and less on mud flinging, I'd appreciate it.

I understand what you're asking.  But again...what good is studying openings going to do you when you dont even have a grasp of the basics?  You blunder material and miss simple tactics.  Studying openings are not going to fix those things.  And that is not "mud flinging" its being realistic.  But as i said before.  Its your time to spend how you want.

I don't know if you have many chess books, but the way I study is that I grab a good book from one of my favorite GMs and review several matches where he used the opening I desire to explore.

I usually play it to the end on the board, so I can understand his moves (with the annotations) and improve my skill.

I recommend choosing only one player as a model, but this is up to you. (In my case, I love to see GM Mecking's games)

Of course, you would need a book (or video, audio etc.) with the opening lines, to understand what is happening and why they are playing each move after you have memorized them.

In my opinion, books are definitely the best way to improve on chess!

I wish you good luck with your training

Anyway, Catalan is extremely complicated and you'll need to be able to play in positional and tactical styles, remember all sorts of move orders, and of course, know tons of theory. Endgames are also an extremely important aspect of the Catalan as the entire game is basically going to be decided based on the slight advantage white will have in a potential endgame (If both sides play correctly). 

If you want a 1. d4 opening that's simpler to play yet still gives white good chances, I recommend the Exchange variation of the Queen's gambit declined instead. 

For black, you're better off choosing one of the 4 main responses against e4 (Caro, French, Sicilian and 1. e5 (Or even one of the more offbeat defenses i.e Pirc, Alekhine etc)) and choosing either 1. d5 or nf6 against d4, and then refining your repertoire from that point on

Of course, you're only rated 600 on Chess.com (Even if you were higher rated on Lichess, you should still be beating these players if you're as high rated as you claim), so learning specific openings and variations is less important than just making sure you play good chess. Even as someone who thinks that beginners should learn openings, building an entire repertoire at that level is a bit premature imo

Just my opinion, I mean no offense

Also, your #2 is what I would do; #3 will be too much to learn and #1 doesn't really help you at all besides memorizing moves. But instead of learning the first steps of each, just learn the few steps of the select openings that you're going to play

Replay 2-3 times in your opening book explorer or GUI or book.

Play hundreds/thousands of games with your prepared opening (May be 10 mins games for beginners, but I do it in 1 min bullet) 

If you forgot the line and get trouble in opening, review your opening. 

Hmm... I'll tell you what I do, then I'll tell you why I'm not sure what the best answer to your question is.

Lines I want to remember as part of my opening repertoire are saved as chessbase files with a few light notes made by me. Sometimes I review them, or start with a blank board and try to reproduce them (to help work them into my memory). Then I'll play some blitz games... sometimes my opponents don't play anything I want to review, and that's too bad. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they play a line or move order I don't know, or I just screw up my opening anyway, so I get to review it some more and the whole process is making forward progress.

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For you, it's tough to practice openings against against random human opponents, because like you said you don't know what they'll play.

The problem with getting an opening reference (book, video, or whatever) and then practicing against a computer is that most lines you learn wont be practical (none of your opponents will play them).

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Maybe the golden median here is to use games against an engine to review openings, but only the basics. Learn a few main lines, and only as deep as move 5 or so.

At lower ratings your opponents will play all sorts of things. The main opening challenge for you in these games isn't so much memory, but how to best apply the opening principles... this isn't as easy as it sounds! Let's do a quick example

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h3 is a common move at lower levels. I call it a feel-good move, or a safety move. It breaks the opening principles (minimize pawn moves, maximize quick development) but sometimes it's uncomfortable to follow the principles so moves like that are played.

So more important than learning 15 moves of theory in dozens of lines, I think you'll get more use out of memorizing a few main lines to a shallow depth, and then review your games, and challenge yourself, asking whether a move was out of fear or because you really believed it followed the opening principles the best.

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5.Be2 develops a piece, so it's superior to 5.h3

From my own experiance is say starting with 1d4 would be the best, i went from 1e4 to the english. Instead 1d4 would of probably been the best. Kinda like jumping on a motorcycle without learning to ride a bicycle. Anyways IMBACON makes some good points although blunt and can feel a bit "d*ckish" lol id foucus on learning the main plans of your opening selection. And whatever you choose stick with it for a couple years.

I've noticed most of the responses here are a bit rude and not at all helpful, so here's my honest input. 

- Learning with the computer. Perfect. I do it all the time, one thing that I'll add is perhaps try and learn against different levels of bots, to help you learn how to punish common mistakes. In chess.com there's a feature to play against a bot from a custom position straight from the analysis board. I use this very often, it makes it a ton easier to learn openings.

- If you have a membership on chess.com try and find some of the challenges for the openings you are studying. These often have some great challenges and videos on middlegame plans related to your opening choices. If this isn't something you can do, you can try learning from master games played in the same opening. I recommend before every move (disregarding the first 10 moves) try and imagine what move you would play, and see wether or not the engine likes it. (Don't worry too much about "best" moves, just focus on making "Excellent" and "Good" moves.) If you practice like this you will get a better understanding of your thought process during common middlegames that will arise from your openings.

Hope I helped.

IMBacon is generally right when he said that you shouldn't be learning openings at that level based on your displayed level. Now we don't know what is your level on li... competitor's site, but bear in mind that their ratings are roughly 200 - 300 points higher than chess.com ratings. If you are not around at least 1 200 here or at least 1 500 there, you shouldn't think about concrete openings at all. You should know 3-5 moves to get the variation you wish to play, and just play on from there. Even 1 200 here should only mildly look at opening explorer after they finish their games (I said mildly, so you shouldn't memorize lines then, but to just take a peek at the explorer).

At my level, which is around 1 550 - 1 600, I still don't need to memorize things. I did memorize some moves just by looking opening explorer and playing games, but that is mainly because I've played games and naturally accumulated some small knowledge. 

Actively memorizing lines is mainly for advanced players (those over 1 800 chess.com ratings or over 2 000 ratings at that other place). These players know why are they playing certain moves and memorization comes a bit easier then.

Players below this have a lot of work to do before learning concrete opening lines. 

First -  general opening principles and avoiding blunders in equal or better positions
After that - all the rest, but there are many things before memorizing long lines. Things like tactics, basic endgames, then more difficult ones, positional stuff like which trades are good, pawn play and how to exploit weak squares and so on. Along with that, when you feel you know something beyond the mere basics, when you play a longer time control game, you should analyze it - at first it will be a simple blunder check and afterwards it would be a more refined analysis.

At this point, you can look at the opening explorer as well after each game in order to see if you've made some mistake in the opening which gave the opponent much better game  (only when you really understand opening principles and follow them, and when you don't just make big mistakes in every game).

By the time you get better at things I've mentioned, you will be better at opening play naturally, and you will know some moves in the openings you are playing. After some of the things I've mentioned, you can look up some master games in the openings you are playing, and still not learn 15 + lines but look at those games in order to find strategy plans, which pawn pushes are thematic, which common tactics occur in those games and so on. 

If you are able to do all of that, you will surely be pretty good and you might even want to learn some concrete lines by heart to give you the edge.

What I've said is not written in stone, but in any case you need to learn how to walk before you start running. So you can change up the order of studying to your satisfaction, but you have to get the hang of mere basics before anything else, and you should leave memorization for the time you are already at least intermediate to advanced player.