How to Build an Opening Repertoire | Chess Meditations

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Choosing an opening repertoire is key to improving your chess. I have tried to give practical advice on how to choose a repertoire, how to know every single variation you might encounter, and how to study the openings you play effectively.

Most people play several different openings poorly, and fail to master them. Choosing one opening and sticking to it makes learning much simpler, and can enable you to build a solid opening repertoire which can’t be easily cracked.

Choose what you play. Do not diversify too much. Even though you might not have developed your own style of play yet, and you might want to search until you find which opening suits you best, it’s really hard to do that when you haven’t put enough practice in and you can’t really grasp any single opening properly.

Therefore, choosing a single opening against e4, d4, c4, and Nf3, and playing only one opening with the white pieces will limit the amount of knowledge you have to gather before you can understand what your style is and what type of opening is for you.

Make sure you have listed every single variation that could occur from the choices you’ve made and don’t let yourself be surprised. List them all! Be prepared for anything that your opponent might throw your way over the board. Look for the bad moves and learn how to punish them.

I have decided to implement a new method of studying openings. It will take up a lot of my time but it will surely improve my opening play.

I plan to study each and every variation that might occur after my opening choices every week, and I plan to go more and more in depth as the weeks go by. I plan to study one move in each variation every week, and thus go 26 moves deep into each variation I might encounter over the board during the next year. As the weeks go by the time it takes me to go through moves will increase exponetially, so I plan to work well in advance.

My rough estimate is that my opening training sessions will last for about an hour and a half each day. That means about 550 hours of work in a year. That’s not too much, but if I stick to the schedule the results are surely to be immense.

I will keep you updated with the progress I’m making! Cheers!

#chess