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

You’ve been reviewing lines from a Chessable course and feel confident. But your opponent plays a weird move on move 3. Suddenly you’re not playing chess any more. 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.

1. The lie about openings

Most players think the goal of opening study is simple:

• 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, this often appears as opening traps: players memorise tricks that win quickly if the opponent cooperates. Sometimes it works and your rating goes up a bit.
But stronger opponents don’t fall for it. The game reaches a normal middlegame and 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.

The underlying assumption is the same:
If I can reach a better position out of the opening, I’ll become stronger.

But chess doesn't work like that.
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.

Grandmasters can squeeze tiny advantages from the opening because their fundamentals are already elite. That small edge actually converts.
Most players aren’t in that situation so they end up over-investing in the least important phase of the game for their improvement.

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

Memorisation feels like control but if your confidence disappears the moment someone deviates, that control isn’t real.
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.

2. What the opening is actually for

When you zoom out, the opening has a much simpler job.

Its purpose is to lead you to middlegames where you can think and learn.
That’s it, because these two things actually lead to improvement.

The opening is a gateway. A good opening gives you positions where you can apply chess principles: central control, piece quality and coordination, king safety and planning.
When you start viewing openings this way, you stop searching for the perfect line and start paying attention to each position. Instead of asking “what move does the engine recommend here?”, you start asking “why is this move popular?”

The opening stops being a test of memory and becomes a training ground for how to think better and learn something with each game.
It took me years to realise this.

3. Even masters fall into this trap

In the year I became an International Master, I made it to the Australian team for the Olympiad. In the lead-up to the event, the other masters on the team gave presentations on openings they specialised in.

I was the only one who didn’t.
I’d played a thousand tournament games but I struggled to explain positions clearly. I was playing from experience and feeling without deeply understanding each move.

Years later, after my FIDE rating crossed 2450 I convinced myself that openings was my weakness I should focus on.
So I did what many ambitious players do: I bought opening courses, reviewed lines obsessively and treated memorisation like serious work.

It felt productive, but over the next couple of years I dropped around one hundred rating points.
The problem was how I was using the courses: I was building memory instead of understanding.

In one game against a GM, I reached the end of a prepared line and I realised I didn’t understand the position at all.
That was the moment it clicked.

Following someone else’s moves doesn’t help you get better at playing chess. If you can’t explain a move in your repertoire in your own words, that’ll come back to bite you one day.

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.

Memorisation isn't 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.

Then we have 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 should start thinking 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 you build something that stays with you 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're cultivating something alive that will grow with you.
Mastery is 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.