You’re studying chess openings the wrong way (do this instead)

You know the feeling.

You’ve been reviewing lines from a Chessable course every day and feel confident. But your opponent plays a weird move on move 3. Your mind goes blank, and the minutes tick by. And suddenly you’re not playing chess. You’re trying to remember.

That’s the problem with how most people study openings. It builds dependence instead of skill.

There’s a Japanese concept called Shu-Ha-Ri (守破離) describing the three stages of learning towards mastery.
First, you follow the form.
Then, you break the form.
Finally, you transcend the form.

Most chess players never move beyond Shu, copying moves without making them their own.

And most content on openings teaches you what to play instead of how to think.

Thinking is what actually makes you strong.

In this post, I’ll show you

• Why most opening study holds you back,
• What the opening is actually for, and
• Exactly how to approach openings at your level.

Let’s start with the lie about openings many of us have been taught to believe.

1. The lie about openings

Most players think the aim of the opening is these three things:

• Find the best opening.
• Memorise more than the opponent.
• Get an advantage.

Sounds logical, but they can all hold you back.

At the beginner to intermediate level, some people think opening traps is the solution. You win quickly, your rating jumps up and you feel like you found a cheat code.
But then, stronger opponents don’t fall for it. You’re in a normal middlegame but you have no idea what to do.

At higher levels, the same pattern appears in a different form.
Instead of traps and winning in the opening, it’s following engine moves and proving your repertoire is better.

But here’s the truth.
You don’t become stronger when you can reach better positions.
You become stronger when you can play better moves in more positions.

Every game of chess you play eventually gets to a position you don’t know.
And then the position only cares about what you understand, not what you remember.
So if you immediately feel lost when you’re out of book, the problem isn’t your repertoire.
It’s your fundamentals.

Grandmasters can justify squeezing tiny advantages in the opening because their fundamentals are elite. That small edge actually converts.
Most players aren’t in that situation. So they’re over-investing in the least important phase of the game for their improvement.

And underneath all of this is fear.
The fear of getting crushed in 10 or 15 moves, the fear of looking dumb and getting embarrassed.

So memorising feels like you have control, but it isn’t real confidence.
If your confidence disappears the second someone deviates, that isn’t strength.

And on the topic of the perfect opening.
If there was one, we would all be playing it, and there wouldn’t be opening courses on absolutely every opening.

There’s no perfect choice that will magically bring out your potential.

You become stronger by learning how to think better.

2. What the opening is actually for

Let’s zoom out for a second.

The opening doesn’t directly make you stronger, but it does give you positions to grow from.
It’s like planting seeds in the garden, rather than looking for the perfect flower to buy.

The aim of the opening is simple:

1. Reach middlegames you’re happy to play, and
2. Learn something from every game.

That’s it.

When you treat the opening as a gateway instead of a destination, it becomes a training ground.
For central control, development, piece coordination and king safety.
These skills and game sense transfer everywhere.
You start seeing your openings as something that prepares you for the middlegame, not a phase you have to beat the opponent in.
Then you start thinking more about why you’re playing each move.

But this took me years to realise.

3. Even masters fall into this trap

Let me tell you something embarrassing.

In the year I became an IM, I made it to the Olympiad team for Australia. In the lead-up to the Olympiad, the other masters on the team presented on an opening they specialised in.
I was the only one who didn’t.
I had experience, but I didn’t have the understanding to explain things clearly.

Years later, after crossing 2450, I convinced myself openings were my weakness.
Maybe because I was avoiding my real weaknesses: time management and calculation.

So I did what many players do: I binged opening courses. Reviewed lines obsessively. Treated memorisation like serious work.

And over the next two years, I lost around 100 rating points.
The problem was that I was using my time and energy building memory instead of skills, and memory by itself doesn’t make you a better player.

In one game against a GM, I reached the end of a prepared line.
And I didn’t understand the position at all.

That was the moment it clicked.
Following someone else’s lines doesn’t help you grow.
You need to understand each position in your own words.
That realisation changed how I train and how I teach.

For amateur players, openings should take up no more than 10 or 20% of your time on chess.
The rest should be playing, analysing, solving and learning.
And even that time on openings shouldn’t be memorising.
It should be reviewing your own games, adding notes in your own words to a file, figuring out why something worked or didn’t work, and learning from games played by others.

I’m not saying memorisation is pointless. You do need to know some specific variations as your level gets higher. But even there, you should have an open mind and question each move.

Daigo Umehara, often considered the greatest ever Street Fighter player, put it like this:

“Theory alone, which anyone can copy, can only get you to a level of 10 at best.
But if you want to keep learning and growing, to level 11, 12, 13 and beyond, you need to question everything from the start and build your own understanding.”

This is where you move from Shu to Ha in the stages of learning - from copying form to breaking it.

Here’s how I think about openings at each rating level.

4. How to think about openings at each rating level

At every level, the goal is to build better thinking.

Let’s start with those rated Under 1000 online.
Here, you’re building awareness.
Your goal here is simple:

• Learn to stop hanging pieces,
• Solve lots of tactics,
• Develop your pieces,
• Castle.

Most games at this level are decided by one-move mistakes.
Your aim for the opening is development and survival.

Next is 1000–1500 online.
Here, you’re building healthy chess habits.

One-move mistakes still decide many games here, so keep solving lots of tactics.
In the opening:

• Control the centre,
• Don’t fall behind in development,
• Don’t move the same piece twice without reason,
• Get castled.

Play what interests you and get curious about all the areas of chess.
Your opponents won’t punish you for not knowing theory.
They’ll punish you for hanging pieces and allowing tactics.

Let’s go to 1500–2000 online.
Here, you’re building understanding.

Now you start asking better questions:

• Where do my pieces belong in a position like this?
• What does my opponent want to do?
• What patterns keep repeating in my games?

When you lose quickly, don’t blame the opening.
Ask which principle you ignored or find the mistake you made and work on that.
Start building simple opening files with your own notes.

Avoid using engines in the opening, because those evaluations are based on two monsters rated 3700 playing a phase of the game in which there are way too many possibilities.
Study human games first. In the Lichess database, filter for rapid and above and rating levels slightly above yours.

Next is 2000+ online.
Here, you’re building depth.

If you want to go deeper, you have to think independently from move one to understand each move and each position.

• Why am I playing this opening?
• Why is this move popular?
• What happens if I try something else here?

Depth begins the moment you start thinking with your own head.
So at the end of each week, look over the games you played in each opening and add your own moves and comments on what you’ve learnt to a file. That way you can feel progress from learning something with each game and you know what you want to play next time.

If you want to get weekly emails with practical tips on chess improvement like these that help you build healthier habits, I write a free newsletter on Substack.

Now we’ll talk about 2000+ FIDE, or those aiming for that level.
Here, you’re building structure.

In over-the-board chess, opponents prepare and inaccuracies are punished.
You want a defined repertoire that you’re committed to for at least one year, not just weeks.

Here’s what Australian grandmaster Moulthun said about deepening your understanding:

“I think it's important that you like what you play and understand it well. So I tend to look at a lot of model games and stem games. In each particular line to get to GM level you probably need at least five games and analyse them very very well”

I used to cram lines during tournaments and forget them afterwards, but that isn’t real knowledge or understanding that becomes a part of you.
By studying model games and adding your own notes to your files every week, because it’s based on deeper work.

And then, you can go to the third stage of learning, Ri - transcending the form and finding your own way of playing it. Because isn’t that one of the reasons we play chess?

5. The Tree

Here’s the image I like.

Imagine your chess life as a house.
Each opening you play is a room.
In that room, a tree is growing.

Every time you play that opening, the trunk thickens.
Every time you explore a variation, a branch grows.
Every time you understand something deeply, a leaf appears.
Every time you apply what you learned, a flower blooms.

You aren’t searching for the perfect room.
You’re cultivating something alive that will grow with you.

Mastery isn’t a shortcut to results.
It’s refinement over time, from copying form to transcending it.
That’s what your openings should be as well.

A training ground for thinking and understanding that will keep helping you learn and improve.