Chess Openings

Hi everyone,

Well I have been struggling in chess more recently and am mad about it really and it is because I suck horribly at openings. How does one get good at openings. Please provide resources for the opening if u know any. Thanks

First: What's your style of play? Aggressive? Defensive? Answering this can narrow your researches.

What have you tried yet? Maybe you picked good openings with wrong ideas. Work on what you already know can ease the task.

You can type «chess openings» in a browser to find some, but getting ideas behind it will require extra research.

you need to know what your good at, and find openings that result in positions that play to your strengths. a good way to try an opening is just play it over and over in bullet/blitz. Youtube is also a great tool.

Or just find openings you enjoy and play them.

I suck at openings, too. :-(

well i guess i am not the only one who sucks at openings ;-D

The best free tool to use is the chessbase online database.

http://database.chessbase.com/js/apps/database/?lang=en

The chessbase app is really good too and only costs €7 not sure what it would cost in dollars.

Depending on how serious you are with chess and if you have the money to spend it would be worthwhile to spend a bit to get chessbase. Every serious chess player has it.

http://shop.chessbase.com/en/products/chessbase13_starter_package_engl

@LordButternoodles

Looking at your ratings I'm a bit surprised about your question. You are above average rated, and probably playing chess for quite some time.

In your case I'd suggest to have your games analysed by a chess coach (GM or IM or FM etc.).

Your opening question imho depends on the positions that you feel comfortable with and are good at.
Once you find out that, then you can apply certain openings better for yourself.

Some time ago I read a story about an IM who had been playing Sicilian Najdorf for the whole of his life, and after a personal opening survey realized that it was better to play something else. Something he was feeling more comfortable with and also didn't take so much time to keep up to date with.

And if you don't want to spend time on openings much, then it makes sense to learn a "system".
For example, many years ago there was a 2100+ player in otb (matches, tourneys) who would always open 1.d2d3 with white to play KIA (or maybe reversed Philidor or Lion).

gl & hf !

Opening systems are obviously preferable to anyone who doesn't want to spend years of their lives studying every probable line of an opening, all the potential blunder points, traps, etc.

For example, against 1. e4 players as Black, I used to play a lot of French, but decided it wasn't suited to me. I then tried Sicilian, but I couldn't wrap my head around the theory when players didn't respond a certain way. Generally as White I now fairly exclusively open with d4 and I have studied several themes with QGA, QGD, and various Indian systems. Against d4 I pretty exclusively play for the Gruenfeld, but will gladly take a KID as well. I've studied them deep and understand the themes. And against e4 I just play e5 and hope they'll play something that gives me a huge tempo advantage like Wayward Queen, or maybe give me an actual Spanish game (never happens). But at least out of the e4-e5 games it's usually pretty easy to figure out what's going on.

By "studied it deeply" I am not by any means saying I have main lines memorized down to the x move, or know all the sidelines, etc. I mean that I understand the themes, and I have looked at the sidelines and understand why someone might make a certain move. In that way I can often punish someone for a bad choice, or understand how to change my ideas based on an opponent's odd opening choice. I think understanding the logic and themes behind openings you favor is preferable then necessarily memorizing everything. But obviously at your level, knowing a few main lines down quite a number of moves is logical if you are looking to move up.

Thanks for all the help everyone, great advice and now I pretty much only play a few openings (queens gambit and ruy as white) and Sicilian dragon vs e4 and grunfeld and nimzo against d4) I think I get into nice positions at times but am unaware of certain lines and sometimes get hit with things in the opening that I just don't know how to respond to and i end up getting horrible positions in the middle game to work with and it is quite frustrating. I'm sure you all have had this problem too and hopefully with some serious opening prep I can make this much less frequent in my games

Also thx achja and no actually I have only been playing for about 2 years and still consider myself relatively new to the game and still have so much to learn. I have spend most of my studying time on the endgame and middle game since that is what was recommended for beginners and now that I have gotten pretty good at those, I think to get to the next level, I have to learn not to get crushed by stronger players out of the opening and that can only be done with some serious opening study I think. Which I will look into with Amadans suggestion to buy chess base :)