Hi!
I've been 2 month into my "serious" chess adventure thereofore I'm still kinda newbie. I've been using four knights For the majority of my games and the reason why I liked it is because there weren't many games in which I felt helpless: even if it wasn't four knights itself I could go for some alike variations or play something around it. Tl;dr: you can't play play sicilian defence every game, or even something along those lines, that's what I don't like about it. So let me know about some essence opening to learn it that is versatile. Also, keep in mind these things are written by a begginer, so right me where I'm wrong.
yoshee
I found myself in similar shoes. I wanted to play some opening consistently but found my opponents shifting play away from these lines or breaking theory early. So I ventured into some other openings and learned how to also transpose into various positions with different move orders. For a new player I would start with some of the following openings:
White:
1. Queens Gambit, Accepted and Declined
2. Ruy Lopez, Exchange Variation and C68 Ruy Lopez: Columbus Variation as well as C70 Ruy Lopez: Morphy Defense, Caro Variation
3. Scotch game, C44 and C45 has a lot of variations within it. Scotch can go either way early on.
Black: (I actually love playing as black sometimes)
1: Nimzo Indian, Rubenstein/Fischer/Kasparov variations and many more here.
2: Sicilian, Mainline/Najdorf/Classical/Dragon etc
3: Robatsch Defenses (as you gain more experience with fundamentals)
I feel like playing these lines will open you up to seeing how other people counter them differently. You need to be as versatile with positions as you expect the position to be to you. After you play a couple matches, go back and look at your mistakes so you can see what type of errors you are making. Learn from those and just take your time finding what you think to be the best move and how you want your board to look a few moves ahead of where it currently is.
Special side note advice for the new player. Only learn the trick openings so that you don't fall prey to them early Scholars etc etc. Moving through the lower rankings you will see people waste time winning with these tricks. Ultimately, once you reach a higher rating with these tactics you begin to meet people who don't fall for it and now you are left up to your chess skills which haven't been developing.
Other fun stuff to look at: Dutch openings as fewer and fewer people study this seriously anymore.
This is just my advice and part of the route I took. This opened a lot of doors for me but I am in no way a professional player. I have no coach and take no classes.
4 knights stuff is always very playable. You could also explore 1.d4 and then just play the London system which is 2. Bf4. It almost does not matter what Black plays here. If you get faced with Bd6 in lines, then drop back to Bg3 and if needed recapture with the h-pawn. Big deal. In some other lines, you do face the c5 thrust, but mostly a fairly playable idea, some ideas of playing for mate or kingside attack or else more general play. Nothing very forced. You won't get mated from the opening. Basic ideas of pawns to e3 and c3 and no big central and premature pawn pushes. Slowly developing is very OK here. Quite OK to play this way also not so much confrontational theory-based prep stuff.
The Colle system is also another evergreen one. (basically it's 1. d4, 2.Nf3, 3. e3, 4. Bd3). Almost anything Black plays and you can just make these 4 moves. No immediate gain, just solid development and very flexible play. You can actually very fast transform to a semi-early attack in this way too. Just because the first 4 moves are very passive does not mean that you intend to only play passively. Ng5 can very often come very fast here.
For Black the evergreen QGD is always a nice method. Absorb pressure for quite a bit and then look to hit back. A very flexible opening. It tests you quite a bit to find less obvious moves (and often less natural moves too) and to always read White's intentions before they become clear ...but there are more than enough subtle methods to challenge white here, quite naturally too. Facing 1.e4 can be more forcing stuff, but maybe Petroff or else Open Spanish can be quite OK here. Well-known themes anyways.
Lots of luck. Chess is very highly complex, but if you do enjoy the 4-knights stuff already ...then the next steps should be fairly OK to encounter. Very few newbies ever start with quite complex 4-knights stuff (seen twice already in Carlsen-Caruana, at the very highest level of GM Chess in these past weeks). This is already quite subtly probing Chess. Small step then, to adopt more advanced concepts. I wish you well in your Chess adventures!
If you are willing to put some time into chess I recommend you to just look some youtube videos about the opening. It is best if the videos are rather short and focus on the main ideas. I really like "thechesswebsite". This was one of the videos and openings I started with:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_caorxTE2w&index=21&list=PL95D57046F196F063Just watch a few of them and pick what you liked the most. The openings work best if you like your positions. So don't force yourself into a queens gambit if it is not your type of positions.
You will take a look at all of them while you become a more experienced player so don't worry with which you should start.
Look man. Realistically a single pawn will rarely ever make the difference in our skill level. So why not have some fun and have very active games every time by playing Kings gambit, Danish gambit, Latvian gambit?
I got it :D