An Idea for Openings

I'm still following the advice of "Don't memorize openings until XYZ rating" but I do want to start learning how to identify most popular openings. It started with a reddit post listing a ton of openings with both names and moves. I took that and ran with it. It had its share of errors so I made my own (part of my DIY-approach to improvement). From that reddit post, I took any of the opening names that I had at least heard of and put them in a spreadsheet. I added in a bunch of other variations that I thought were worth knowing or looked popular. Then using wikipedia and lichess (sidenote, you can also open the mobile app>Menu>Board Editor>Gear Symbol> and choose an opening to see the first moves), I populated all the moves for the openings I chose. I ended up with 89 openings.

I wanted to memorize them so I could say, "here's a Caro-Kann Advanced Variation" or "This game started with a Sicilian Rosslimo." It could be a launchpad into exploring the openings further down the line, or it could just help in communicating about chess in general and following commentators more easily.

Anyway, here's an image of my spreadsheet.

The actual spreadsheet has more columns for things like general ideas, external resources like youtube links on a given opening, tricks and traps, and common continuations. I'm slowly adding to that but my first objective is to memorize the names and moves of these 89 openings.

How to memorize?

I spend a lot of downtime at work (there's a lot for me) on chess stuff. I figure this is a good time to study openings, at least the basic opening moves, since it's pretty much an excel sheet with text so I don't have to have a chess site open or stare at lichess on my phone which might look suspicious to fellow co-workers. One caveat is that I had some portion of this list already known from my time playing some of the openings and also from putting the list together in general. Like they say in college, sometimes just writing the notes is enough to help you begin learning.

Here's my old school way of memorizing at work:

1. Pick a subset of the openings (like the e4 section for example). Re-acquaint yourself with each one, basically just read through each line. Like cramming before the test.

2. Then start at the top, hide the name column and for each line, read through the moves and write/type in a .txt file the name of the opening. Example: e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, d4....is the Scotch Game.

3. Check over what you did in step 2 for errors. Take note of the ones you're struggling with.

4. Now go back through but hide the moves this time. For each opening name, mentally recite the moves.

5. Go through the subset a third time, hiding the moves again. For each opening name, write/type out the moves. 

6. Check your work noting the ones you're still struggling with.

7. Move on to other subsets until you've gone through the entire table. Then start fresh again but make your subsets larger. And pay special attention to the ones you've had a hard time memorizing. Feel free to take out the ones you absolutely know by heart. Consider using a real chess board at home to shake things up.

Eventually you'll have them all memorized. It will probably help to shuffle up the order of the subsets as you're going through this, and eventually shuffle the order of the full list of your openings.


Ideas for more study

* Pull an opening out of a hat, play through the moves on lichess' analysis board, and guess the most popular continuations from the opening database. 

* Add a column in your spreadsheet for "General Concepts" and use various resources to find out the common themes in each opening such as where the pawn break is, what files usually open, if it often leads to a minority attack, etc.

* Find a famous example of a game for each/most openings and play through it, annotate it, memorize it, etc.