How many total openings are there in chess?

Kindaspongey.

@kindaspongey

ok ty

There over 9000

There are supposedly 6 openings not discovered yet. 

Then how do they know there are six more if they have not discovered it?

Because he is destined to know it.

huh ok

I've heard there's about a total of over 100 chess openings, however, they're not all good openings. Durkins Opening ( aka Sodium Attack) for example, is very rarely played, and is argued as a very bad opening. In a sense, there's around 50 to 60 good openings for chess, including openings for both black and white players. Other then that, it's hard to tell how many there are exactly, because some openings played by less experienced players aren't even listed as actual openings, but they are played as openings. It doesn't matter if the opening has a name for it or not, you can play it, it's just a matter of weather you win or lose. If you add these openings into the equation, you could be talking hundreds more openings alike. If you're looking to study openings, however, I'd go with the top 10 that grandmasters play, you can find the list easily either here at chess.com or elsewhere online. 

Chessbase Opening Encyclopedia 2019 has over 1,100 special theory databases, and 6,680 opening surveys. Each survey examines a single variation. It doesn't mean it's a named variation. For example, a survey might look at a variation of the French Defense: Classical... Rubinstein variation, but then maybe a particular variation a few moves deeper than the point where the "Rubinstein variaton" usually starts.

The ECO codes where designed to try and broadly catagorize chess openings. Divided into A/B/C/D/E, with 100 sub-codes (A00-A99, B00-B99, C00-C99, D00-D99, E00-E99). I think Chess Informant invented the ECO codes.

For anybody curious, in Chessbase, a special theory database have very limited number of games in some particular opening variation.

A Chessbase Opening Survey is a single game that's been deeply annotated with plenty of sub variations also annotated. The entire game isn't annotated, just the opening moves and variations, but it's still a huge amount of annotation.

In the first two moves there are 400 different openings (including unnamed)

"The Oxford Companion to Chess lists 1,327 named openings and variants, and there are many others with varying degrees of common usage."

I recall reading a book back in the early '70s, perhaps Fireside Book of Chess by Chernev, that there were more ways to p[lay the first 12 moves of a game of chess than there were raindrops that would fall on "greater" Chicago in over a decade. Of course most of the ways are worthless,