Minimalist Opening Study

There’s been a lot of talk lately on Twitter (currently X) about whether or not you should study openings as a beginner or intermediate/club player. The advice is that you should NOT study openings; you should just play by opening principles. You see the same pattern with people suggesting you shouldn’t play blitz. Playing blitz can give you bad habits, but it also exposes you to a lot of games and can be a lot of fun in a way that classical chess isn’t.

The people who give this advice about openings, blitz, and other things are suggesting that you avoid something that they have probably done way too much of and have realized that it isn’t benefitting them. This is advice, given in good faith, that often completely fails to recognize the benefits that the person has already gained from what they now consider a bad habit. If you follow the advice, you will avoid the trap they fell into, but you will also miss all the benefits that they unconsciously gained from it. The most ardent proponents are often those who learned chess as a kid and don’t realize all the benefits they got from “wasting time” playing pick-up games with their friends, reading obscure chess books, and playing fun variants. If you are reading this, you are not going to be the world champion, so you might as well enjoy the game. And, if you absolutely love opening study, go for it.

TL;DR: I have consistently been able to get out of the opening either equal or with an advantage without doing any deep opening study or using Chessable courses. In the next section, I tell you how I got there. You can skip to the section after that if you want to see my suggestions on how you can do it yourself.

My journey with openings

Starting out

Here’s my own arc of opening studies. When I started playing chess again after The Queen's Gambit chess boom, I immediately started studying openings because I wanted to make it far enough into the game to actually have a game. Too many games were ending in the first 10-15 moves, so I picked openings that tried to avoid deep prep or weird tricks from my opponents.

During this time, I was getting out of the opening equal or with an advantage less often than those around my rating range. The reason was that the lines or move orders would often be different than what I learned in the opening courses and I didn’t understand enough about what was going on to adjust to whatever had changed in the position. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the “plan” for the position; it’s that there were too many possibilities and, as a rank beginner, I couldn’t see them all.

My assessment of opening performance comes from my Aimchess report. It has a good report that shows the percentage of times you are equal or have an advantage at the end of the opening phase (however they define it) and also shows you the expected range for results from people around your rating. I can’t recommend Aimchess though. They were bought by Chess.com as part of the Play Magnus deal and I play almost exclusively on Lichess. I think it’s just a matter of time until the Aimchess functionality just gets folded into the Chess.com interface and cuts out Lichess entirely.

Reinventing the wheel

I gave up studying openings entirely when I joined the original version of the ChessDojo program. The ChessDojo 1.0 advice for those under around 1000 or 1200 was to play only by opening principles. You should play 1. e4 for white, and 1. e4 e5/1. d4 d5 for black and then just play the board. You would learn what you needed to know to improve your openings by analyzing your own games without ever consulting an engine.

Playing just by opening principles was a very useful approach that taught me to look at the board as it is and not to make moves just because that’s the line from the opening course. It was also completely and wholly demotivating because I was losing out of the opening to every gambit and meme opening out there and didn’t have the analysis skills to come up with winning opening theory on my own. I should also note that, in addition to never studying openings and never using the engine to analyze your games, the ChessDojo program, at the time, considered any game shorter than a classical time control to be cheating on your training and a waste of time. For these and other reasons, I left the program. I know they added in the possibility of shorter time control games around the time I left. I have no idea if they updated their stance on openings as well.

During my time with the ChessDojo, I consistently got out of the opening equal or with an advantage around 70% of the time, which was the expected performance for my rating range. I was getting the average for my rating band just by playing using opening principles. I had an e4 opening for white, but I’d never really played e5 or d5 with black. Yes, I was losing left and right to trick openings, but in some of them I could fight back and make a game of it. Those games definitely weren’t fun though.

Minimal study

After I left the ChessDojo, I decided to study openings again, but just enough that I could get past the trickiest openings and then play using opening principles. I worked with my coach, JJ Lang, to get a handle on playing black against d4 openings. I started developing good skills against e4 openings, so that I could avoid annoying things like the Fried Liver. I looked at short videos on openings where I had weaknesses like the Alapin Sicilian, but only ever enough to know the first few moves and general concepts behind that particular opening.

Thankfully, around this time, Chessbook had been created and was maturing nicely as a tool. Chessbook helps you build your repertoire by showing you moves that occur often in games at your level and showing you options for responses that include their success rate when played at your level. If you link it to your accounts, it will also check your games against your repertoire and show you just the move where you deviated. It’s brilliant. Ivan has an excellent review of Chessbook over on his newsletter 64 Squares.

Since I left the ChessDojo and started using Chessbook, I’ve consistently been getting out the opening equal or with an advantage 80-90% of time according to Aimchess. My Lichess Insights corroborate this result. I have high accuracy/low centipawn loss in the opening phase and it’s really clear it’s the middle game where I’m losing games. I don’t think you can ask for more from your openings than that.

How to apply this to your chess

Playing only by opening principles can be a lot to ask. It’s not the funnest way to play chess. Still, buying that next opening course is unlikely to get you better results. Sticking to what you already know, even if it isn’t the current “best” opening, can get you pretty far. Kamryn got extremely far playing just the London and Tyler1 has made massive progress by apparently only ever playing the Cow, the dubious opening created by Anna Cramling.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Play new things using only opening principles for some period of time or number of games.
2. Build your repertoire one move at a time.
3. Build an entire repertoire using Chessbook, but only refer to it after your games.
4. All of the above.

Playing just by opening principles

If you can stomach it and you don’t already play e4 as white or a e4/e5, d4/d5 as black, I can highly recommend just putting the move on the board and reacting to it. If you normally play those moves, then pick something else like Nf3 or c4 for white or e6 (French) or c6 (Caro-Kann) for black.

Playing a position from the first move is great experience for dealing with situations when opponents go out of book really early. You’ll learn to see the board clearly. I wouldn’t do it forever. It’s a bit too much to ask, as the early ChessDojo did, to rediscover a century's worth of opening theory using just your own amateur analysis. But, if you can play a few months or a few hundred games this way and stomach the potential loss of rating, you will benefit immensely from it.

Building your repertoire one move at a time

Another approach is suggested by Nate Solon, but it does require some effort (Part 1, Part 2). Every time you play a game, compare it against your repertoire, which you’ll keep in a Lichess study or Chessbase file. The idea is to start the study with the bare minimum. Every time you finish a game, add one move to your repertoire: either the move you made because it was objectively a good move or the move you would have made if you’d had access to the opening book.

The idea here is that next time you are likely to remember the move you’ve added because you just played it in a game, or wished you’d played it. The move is immediately relevant to you in a way that the average move in a Chessable course or opening book isn’t.

It does take a bit of extra effort and some conscious organizing to keep this system up to date, but it is both free and incredibly useful.

Building your repertoire in Chessbook

The approach I use now is with Chessbook. I’ve filled out an entire repertoire for white and black based on the moves that happen in 1 in 100 games or fewer for the rating band just above the one I’m in. I’ve also added to other repertoire files for new lines that I’d like to learn, like the two knights attack against the Caro-Kann and French defences.

Chessbook allows you to connect your Lichess and CC accounts. When you’re finished playing, you can go over to Chessbook and look at your mistakes. It will show you the first move where you deviated from your chosen line and have you play the correct move from your repertoire. Just the first move, no matter how deep your repertoire is. It’s enough to remind you where you made the deviation and what you were supposed to play.

Chessbook also offers spaced repetition. In general, I avoid this. I want to learn by making the mistakes in the game and seeing the consequences, not by memorizing obscure lines 5 or 8 moves deep. I have used their feature where you can train the parts of your repertoire where you make errors most often. They include errors from both your spaced repetition practice and your games, so if never used the spaced repetition, you’ll be reviewing the mistakes you make most often while playing, which is good.

I think the first 100 moves for each colour are free on Chessbook. That’s probably enough to hold your main repertoire for white for moves seen in 1 in 75 or 100 games, but it’s not enough for black if you play e5 and d5. I found Chessbook beneficial enough that I decided to buy a yearly membership. Not everyone can afford that, so it is worth noting that with just a little extra effort you can do essentially the same thing for free with a Lichess study.

Do all three

I can’t tell you which part of my journey had the most impact. I’d love to tell you that you can do well just using Chessbook or the one-move-at-a-time method that Nate suggests. More likely, it could very well be that the year of sporadic games I played with no opening studying at all got me to where I am with openings (they were sporadic because I have playing anxiety and knowing that every game was going to be uncomfortable did not help it). Hopefully, one or all of these methods will lead you to success in your own training and let you focus on things that will have actual impact, like tactics, tactics, and more tactics, rather than learning 80 obscure variations of the latest fad opening. However, if deep opening study is where you get your joy in chess, keep doing it.

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