Simple complete opening repertoire?

As someone who loves to play everything at the same time i would like to settle on a simple repertoire so i can focus on the middlegame and endgame.

What would be your recommendations for a full (White and Black) repertoire?

"Keep it simple" from IM Christof Sielecki. Available in written form or as a video series for 1. e4, 1. d4 and for Black.

The simplest complete opening repertoire I can imagine is to play the Philidor-Hanham structure with both, black and white, against everything. THere is a book on it, called "side stepping mainline theory" by Welling and Giddins.

@Alakaluf said in #3:

The simplest complete opening repertoire I can imagine is to play the Philidor-Hanham structure with both, black and white, against everything. THere is a book on it, called "side stepping mainline theory" by Welling and Giddins.

Actually the Czech leads often to those philidoresque structures. Try out, it’s rewarding.

@Alakaluf said in #3:

The simplest complete opening repertoire I can imagine is to play the Philidor-Hanham structure with both, black and white, against everything. THere is a book on it, called "side stepping mainline theory" by Welling and Giddins.

A good shout. I have this book. It's interesting.

You already have a full repertoire in your chess insights and maybe not if you don't have enough games played. Try to use the data from your own chess insights and ask an AI what it all means. It will give you an analysis of your strengths and areas to work on.

https://lichess.org/insights/Re2OnlyMove/accuracy/openingFamily/color:white
https://lichess.org/insights/Re2OnlyMove/accuracy/openingFamily/color:black

The advise of the AI will be useful advise, because it used your own data. The number of moves in the chess insight data is very important. I copy pasted my data to chatgpt.com and it gave an overall assessment. Based on my data, not anyone else, here’s the analysis of my strengths and areas I need to work on:

It seems at my rating level compared to the rest of my white repertoire data, I excel in white openings like the Pirc Defense, Queen's Pawn Game, and Caro-Kann Defense. To improve, I should be focusing more on sharpening my strategies in the King's Pawn Game, Ruy Lopez, and Scandinavian Defense. But that's me, not you. If you don't feed your data to the AI you will never know what you need to work on or what you excel in at the moment.

Overall Assessment of my black:
I perform very well in many black openings, especially the Pirc Defense, English Opening, and Indian Defense. However, I could focus more on improving my Scandinavian Defense, Philidor Defense, and Nimzowitsch Defense, where my accuracy is notably lower.

So Pirc Defense is my best opening no matter the color. I should specialize in that opening and work on the others.
https://lichess.org/training/Pirc_Defense

Thank for the forum subject and chatgpt, I now know what I personally need to work on. @Re2OnlyMove

@Re2OnlyMove said in #1:

As someone who loves to play everything at the same time i would like to settle on a simple repertoire so i can focus on the middlegame and endgame.

What would be your recommendations for a full (White and Black) repertoire?

The answer is obvious, use the whole human repertoire by playing correspondance and using the opening explorer, there you have put a dent on the memory load, can use your generalist nature to explore it is all offloaded there...

So you would not have to cling to a deep line that promises you fair odds further down (or deep, depends on tree orientation in that mental representation of the decision tree, I use left root right divergenece myself, but computer science prefers top down.... details).

and bonus on your way for uncramped chess positions, you get to be exposed without stress of move-chess memory load, and fear of the unknown side ways (it is right there, if you get curious, so no need to cling in fear of the unknown).

This may look jokey... and I admit smiling while writing... but I am also seriously suggesting it might be worth exploreing as theory of learning single person experiment. my trajectory has me not having any other choice, but it might be also a thing for others.. so my 2 cents... here. done.

@Re2OnlyMove at your level, I think middlegame and endgame skills are more important

For Black, 1...e6, 2...d5 works against just about everything. Most commonly you will play French or QGD. Maybe you don't try to "follow the lines" too deeply., maybe five moves. Maybe then you consider that the middlegame starts where your preparation ends, rather than where current theory says it starts.

@Re2OnlyMove Another option is to play the Hippopotamus with white and black (check the famous book by Alessio di Santis).

Nice sideeffect: You learn the Kingsindian- and French-Structures on your way mastering the Hippo => so you simultaneously prepare to play that openings later, too.

Good luck on your lifelong chess journey!