Best way to record your opening repertoire?

Hi - does anyone have a recommended method for storing and maintaining their opening repertoire?  

I want to be able to have one single golden source for my chosen moves as white and black.  I want this to include potential forks where I have learned two responses and the subsequent lines.  I'd like it to be stored in the minimum number of files, and I'd like it to be intuitive to browse through, add lines to, check against my recently played games, etc.

There is a lot of software out there for training against specific opening lines etc., but in my experience it is hard to use the same software for maintaining one overall opening database.  Which means the knowledge can get messy, especially if learned lines are coming from different sources or applications.  Maybe I want to mix and match a couple of recommendations from different sources.  Where to consolidate them all for personal use?  If anyone has managed this in a time-effective way I'd love to have some tips!

If the answer is to create a pgn (or several pgns), I'd really appreciate any advice on how best to subdivide these (at what level), how you maintain the store in a time-effective way and/or how you use these for training, via any successful methods you have found.  So far Chess Position Trainer is the closest I've come to being able to visualise everything in one go, and compare periodically to games I have played, but I believe it is no longer supported.  Thanks for any thoughts! 

I learned myself Scid vs Pc two months ago. Takes a day. Best day in my chess life (except for my draw against Hans Bohm in a simul 25 years ago).

I tried several such software and in the end I came to the conclusion that I'd rather just try to remember them and/or consult books/databases/articles about them. It's a more natural kind of way of remembering. 

Chesstempo's move trainer is pretty useful, although it's pretty tedious to set up.

However I do it old school, I write out opening lines on paper and play through with them on a real board. It makes memorizing stick with you better than the online counterpart.

 

I have been trying out CPT and it was pretty much exactly what I wanted.  The scheduled repetitions with increasing time and the ability to follow through all the options, all great.

I liked the ability to store lots of different repertoires, eg a training course on English + youtube video on the subject, + info from a book, all in separate opening files, yet common positions were not repeated, and I could see the source of my information if I wanted to review the original material again.  So being a position DB rather than move DB had certain advantages.

Seeing your post, I've had a quick look, and the site registration is broken, forum link broken, last blog post was 2014... so I guess it's pretty dead.

However it does still work....

Do any of the other programs have the same type of features?

I tried Scid vs pc too  it's a nice tool ,but Scid isnt allowed to write in PGN so you have to convert and i found this counter intuitive.

Chessx  is nice too, much more simple to handle , there is a guess the move feature .

But he doesnt accept big PGN files, over 800 games in a file and he's freezing.

PGN-extract is a fantastic tool, you can make what you want from this one ex :extract all the games that match your own repertoire from the week in chess PGN in one manipulation.

The only problem is you must type all windows command lines by hand .

I think you must be a windows programmer at least .

There is guess the move, a tiny tool  to train 

Lucas chess is useful too

https://chessimprover.com/guess-the-move-software/

https://chessx.sourceforge.io/

http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/

https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/djb/pgn-extract/

https://lucaschess.pythonanywhere.com/downloads

 

Chess.com is supposed to be coming out with a "kickass opening trainer/repertoire builder", which I'm looking foward to. In the recent State of chess.com stream Danny Rensch said that it's at the top of their priorities list.

I'll check these resources maybe: I had a similar thread, so perhaps a glance at that one would be useful for you too

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-openings/saving-opening-repertoire 

I too have been looking at repertoire training options and unless you opt for one of the online resources, it seems your choice is between Chess openings Wizard and Chess Position Trainer. I  prefer CPT because of its superior GUI. You have your whole repertoire in front of you in a neat explorer pane and don't have to switch from book to book. COW also has a few technical glitches and it's expensive in the pro version.

The problem with CPT is, as has been mentioned, there's nobody home. Whilst the free version works, the biggest drawback is that it won't run an engine. Some training scheduling functions are also unavailable but that's no big deal. It looks like you could still buy a licence for $40 but what support would you get? None I imagine.

Ive had this same challenge and through trial and error I figured a system that works very well for me and sounds like might be for you as well.

Play out the line on Lichess then copy and paste the pgn into notepad on your phone.

Organize them by opening and try to categorize them with what make sense for you. This list will become very long so look through your game explorer to see what you face the most and make sure those variations are at the top of your notepad list.

Spend time daily or like me prior to a live game & go one by one reviewing a few variations by copying the pgn from your notepad back to lichess to play through it or quiz yourself.

Hope that helps! For me has been the only way to put everything in one source.

I kind of think for that you may as well put it in chessable or something, at least you can just load and play them...

I have been trying with chessable, just to see what's out there, and here's my thoughts so far.

It's more modern, and works, but the navigation lacks quite a bit, eg if you want to edit a variation, you have to create a new one and then delete the old one, and moving from edit variations, to view variations, to viewing your courses etc takes a lot of going in circles.  Sometimes you have to go back to the dashboard and start again as there's no link to the thing you're working on.  However it is possible.

The spaced repetition learning looks good, you can control the frequency and depth, and unlike what I found on CPT, you can exclude lines and variations from training very easily.

The biggest problem is just how you interact with it to add/explore new variations after you've set it up.

Imagine you watched a YT video and saw an interesting variation that you want to learn and train.

In CPT you play that (seeing all the other possible moves, or all openings/lines/folders as you do so), understanding how this is different to what you already have, and then at the the end it's a new position to train. Simple and you're looking at everything you already have up until the point of divergence, maybe you have a position where only the last move differed, and now you have an alternative.

In chessable, you can browse the tree, and then you can't link from a position to the variations that contain that position.  You can search courses, however it searches all, not just yours, but you can see yours, and you might find it exists in a number of courses.

You'd have to go into each one and play back and forward on a number of separate variations to see where you're new line fits in/compares/should be added.

None of that is necessary in CPT.

On the other hand, chessable is developed and supported, requires no installation, is fast, can be used on any device from anywhere, you're data is all backed up etc....

I'm going to put things in there, and then if CPT 6 ever comes out, I can just import all the PGN files.

Hope that helps someone!

I find Lichess' Study tab good for this

Thanks for the comment; I may look into this sometime

Many thanks all for all your kind thoughts. I have covid right now so haven’t been so active checking this, but it was a welcome surprise to see so many thoughts. It does sound like there’s a bit of a gap in the market.  Overall CPT sounds like the best place to amalgamate everything. What I might try is uploading a master pgn from CPT to chessable periodically , into a master review book - perhaps there is a way to do this without duplicating existing variations so that my master chessable rep just constantly evolves to reflect my latest additions.  I do like the facility in a CPT to compare a batch of my games against my rep to identify places where my opponent played out of my book, and so add responses to these moves. 

What about Chess Trainer Pro for Android ?  It's specifically for building and practicing opening repertoires.  It also allows use of UCI engines for analysis.

try practicing and being consistent with it

 

Does chessbase have a position based repertoire builder that enables spaced repetition learning?

I know... I could go and look couldn't I.  have to say, my recollection of visiting chessbase is that there are about 20 products, each about €300, and you need all of them to have a complete product. (probably exaggerated in my mind )

No. They have training features but not true spaced repetition.

I use Lichess Studies. Chessbase is the most ideal but for intermediates who don't play in tournaments, it works just fine. Has database and engine at disposal. I do use Chesstempo to practice the lines but for now, I uses the Short & Sweet Courses on Chessable and study those. 

 

Just went to have a look, and still makes no sense to me.  Maybe it's designed for people who've spent a lifetime in the world of chess only....

Products -> Programs shows

• Fritz 18: everything you need
• Fritz 18 + ChessBase 16: so the above was not everything
• Komodo: no idea.... \o/
• Fat Fritz 2 SE: successor to Fat Fritz and based on AlphaZero (like that helps me)

Then under shop assistant 

• ChessBase: The Chess Database Program: Game Mgmt for tournament players (not me)
• Fritz: The program that can do everything (what is chessbase then???) which is a "playful introduction", so clearly can't do everything...

It's like they don't want to sell any...

This, in addition to (but almost more than) the prices drove me away from their site in search of something better...