When you first start playing, you may find your opponents using the same openings over and over.ġ. Taking less time in the opening is important to save you precious time whether you are participating in over the board tournaments or playing speed chess online.Įven in longer games where you have an hour and a half or more of time, you still don’t want to focus too long on the opening when you could have memorized basic chess openings and opening chess traps. Studying Allows You To Take Less Time in the Opening This involves knowing when to push certain pawns, where the pawn breaks are, and where your pieces are ideally placed. Instead, focus on understanding the ideas behind specific openings you run into so you are more prepared to face them head on. That being said, I don’t want you to get the idea that you should memorize every opening 10 moves deep, at least not if you are under 2000 elo. They often spend minutes thinking about their first few moves rather than seconds. It’s easy to tell when a player is seeing an opening for the first time. Studying chess openings is important is because it will help you understand what your plans are, what your opponent wants to accomplish and it will give you more time to think later in the game. How Many Openings are Possible in Chess?.Let me know in the comments if there is anything you’d like me to shed more info on: Table of Contents This article is really long, so here are some quick links to the best parts of this chess opening article that I’ll be discussing. If you’re looking for a new opening to try you’ll find a great jumping off point here. The Sicilian Najdorf, French, and London System are just a few chess openings you’ll read about today. You’ll learn the main ideas behind some of the best & most popular chess openings, all in one place. I put this list of chess openings together to help other chess players learn basic chess opening theory. That said, you should have a basic familiarity with chess openings so you’re not surprised by them. When it comes to chess improvement, you don’t need to memorize the opening.