A repertoire from your own games

Every club player has said it: I know I studied this opening, why can't I remember it? The honest answer is that you studied a line, and lines do not survive. What survives is a structure and a plan: where the pawns go, which piece goes where, what the first idea is once the opening is over. You can hold six of those in your head for life. You cannot hold sixty lines for a week.

Start from what you actually play

Do not start from a book. Start from your games. The openings pages on this site list every opening with real games behind it, and your own game list can be filtered by opening. Look at your last hundred games and answer three questions:

1. Which five openings cover most of my games? Usually it is fewer than you think. One or two with White, three or four with Black, depending on what your opponents play.
2. In which of them do I score worst? Not “which do I dislike”: which loses. That is the one to work on first.
3. In that opening, where does it go wrong? Open the games you lost. The mistake is almost never on move five. It is on move twelve to twenty, when the opening is over and you have no plan.

That last point is the whole article. Your opening problem is a middlegame problem in disguise.

One plan per structure

For each of your five openings, learn one plan. Not a line: a plan, in words, that you could say to a friend.

• Italian with d3: castle, play c3 and d4 when the pieces are ready, or keep it closed and go for a kingside push with Nh2 and f4.
• Against the French as White: take space with e5, the bishop on d3 points at h7, the knight goes to f3 then to g5 or e5, and Black's light-squared bishop is bad. Never trade it for them.
• Sicilian as Black: the c-file is mine, put a rook on c8, the knight comes to c4 via a5 or e5, and I do not open the centre until my king is castled.

That is enough. With one plan per structure you arrive at move fifteen knowing what you want, and you can spend the clock on the position instead of on remembering.

The forgetting problem

“I always forget how to play against the French” has a specific cause: you play against it once a month, and once a month is below the frequency at which a plan sticks. Two fixes:

• Write the plan down in one sentence, where you will see it. A note on the opening page here, a card, anything. Read it before you play a game, not after.
• Repair it. When the site tags a mistake in a French game, repair the position. Being put back in front of the exact moment you forgot, and finding the move, is the retrieval that makes the plan stick. A plan you have retrieved three times is yours.

What to study, and what to skip

Study: the typical middlegame positions of your five openings, ten to fifteen moves in. Master games in those structures. Your own losses in them.

Skip: anything more than twelve moves deep. Sidelines your opponents do not play. Anything you cannot summarise in a sentence. If a line has to be memorized, it is a line you will forget, and it is not worth your time at this rating.

The tell

You reach move fifteen in an opening you play regularly and you do not know what to do. That is the opening to work on, and the work is a plan, not a line.

The habit

After every game in one of your five openings, one sentence in your notes: what was the plan, and did I follow it? Ten games later you will know your repertoire better than any book could teach it to you.