How can I memorize chess openings?

Hey everyone

i was wondering as to how do you memorize chess openings for when playing chess for example it someone was to play the fischer defense what move should i play?

A common method for memorizing openings lines is to use Chess Opening Wizard, formerly known as Bookup. Chess Position Trainer is a free alternative.

(Of course, unless you're at least 1800, you are completely wasting your time.)

As likesforests said, Bookup is a very nice program for this purpose.

However, your language ("if someone was to play the fischer defense what move should i play?") indicates studying openings is not what you should do to improve. It's like studying differential equations when you can't solve quadratic equations. First learn the basics before doing stuff like memorizing openings.

I agree with Phobetor.  Play and practice.  Learn what works and doesn't.  Find two openings as White and two openings as Black and study these.  Once you finish a game, go over it and see where the critical postion is.  Any opening can be played once, but if you won by luck or your opponent did not know the opening, and you played a bad line, time to retire it and try something else.  Play something that is fun.  Try to play a game, finish it, then see if you can re-play the game without looking at the scoresheet.  That's what you should work on for memory.  Every single master I have ever encountered can turn over a score sheet and re-play his game after it was just played.  They may not be able to do it the next day, but it can be done.  Re-enforce your opening by looking it up in an opening book and prepare an alternative move if you wish to repeat the variation.  The top players don't reveal their best moves unless they have to.  Develop pattern recognition, not memory.  Now I forgot what I was writing about.  Oh, well.

Good grief.  Don't try.  As noted, unless you are at least 1800, don't even try.  Concentrate on tactics and strategy.  You would benefit from using, as much as possible, one or two 'preferred' openings for White and Black.  Over time, as you analyze your games, you will see where you (or your opponent) diverted from known solid lines.  Then you study and try to learn why the non-book move is bad.  Over time, you will learn openings through experience.

The reason that memorization does not work is that there are an endless number of lines and sub-lines for every opening.  Your opponent has a lot to say about what opening you will wind up playing anyway, so you must be flexible.  You have no chance of memorizing even a fraction of the possibilities.  In time, you will learn the openings, and where you took a wrong turn, by analyzing the opening of each game and comparing it to book lines.

Even if you memorize an opening, your oppenent will probably screw up fairly quickly, and then you are back to tactics and strategy because the opening lines are blown.  At 1800+ you have played enough games and studied enough of your openings to simply 'know' openings and most of the main and secondary lines - simply by playing your way up to that level.

Studying your games at least through the opening, up to the point where you or your opponent makes an opening blunder/error is THE best way to learn openings IMO.  Then identify why the mistaken move (yours or his) was flawed and how to gain an advantage.

I haven't read all the comments.  But, I will just say that you will be able to "memorize" openings when you understand the principles and ideas behind them.  If they are just a bunch of random moves memorized then you will forget them or people will deviate and your opening will turn into the closing of the opportunity to win the game. 

Learn the why of every move and you will start to have it stick. 

you should write the move down and read it each time until u have it memorized. sorry thats my best advise

I would urge you to eschew memorization in favour of understanding the themes and ideas behind a particular opening.  Learn a few of the main variations and understand what lines you like through the lens of these themes and ideas so that you can direct the opening to your preferred lines where possible, but also adapt to the unexpected as needed.

If all you do is memorize the lines, as soon as someone puts you out of book you're going to be at a loss unless you understand why you're playing the moves in each line.

It is probably more important to understand the ideas behind the various openings than to just blindly memorize certain moves.  In general, you are aiming to develop all your pieces as quickly as possible towards the centre, to put pressure on your opponent's weak points, and induce him to make weakening pawn moves while restricting his own plans.  You might want to take a look at books like Reuben Fine's Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, Gabor Kallai's Basic Chess Openings or Sam Collins' Understanding the Chess Openings.  Understanding Chess Move by Move by John Nunn and the earlier book by Irving Chernev also give detailed explanations of each move.  In the long run, you'll want to learn how to evaluate positions, and decide on your own which move is better of different alternatives.  Kotov talks a bit about how to evaluate in Think Like A Grandmaster.

Fischer's defence is a line in the King's Gambit Accepted 1.e4 e5 2.f4 ef 3.Nf3 d6.  3...d6 is played to keep white's knight out of e5.  The main line runs 4.d4 g5 5.h4 g4 6.Ng1 Bh6 7.Nc3 as played by Nigel Short against Akopian at Madrid 1997.  White occupies the centre while black launches a kingside pawn storm to harass white's king.

One thing that I've noticed with my play over the last few months is that I was using the same opening moves over and over.  I had never seen the opening before but I just started looking at the board and thinking more about the pieces I was using and the opening just sorta appeared and my game has been strengthening ever since.  I've now learned that I'm using a C44 or C45 Scotch Game depending on the variation you look at.  Basically the point that I'm trying to make and the point I believe TheGrobe is making above is that memorizing the opening isn't valuable if you don't know WHY you're making the moves you're making.  In my instance I wasn't interested so much in a particular opening as I was in just working with the pieces and finding ways for them to compliment one another.  The opening kinda fell in to place after that.  I'm a software developer so the best way that I can relate this is in this way.  I can give you all of my source code but unless you have the knowledge and the tools to compile and run it, it doesn't do you any good.  Openings are kinda the same way.  You can memorize and opening but unless you know how to use it effectively, it doesn't really do you much good.

The guy needs to know the IDEAS behind the moves. Its best to know the tactics before the moves. You should at least have an uscf rating OVER 1000 

Worry about openings later, first just try to adhere to some principles, control the center, don't make too many pawn moves, develop pieces, and don't move them more then once or twice during the opening without a good reason, don't leave your king in the center if the position is open or is about to open up.

Once you get to 1500+ you can start to worry about openings a bit more, until then learn to develop soundly and learn tactics.

Personally, I think the best thing to do is get together with a friend who plays well and ask him to sit with you and teach you. Offer him a few bucks or dinner in exchange for an afternoon or evening of chess work. I've done this with some friends who wanted to learn openings and I showed them. It's fun and they'll get as much enjoyment out of teaching you as you will learning from them.

I saved this link from another generous member who shared it as a reply to an article - http://www.exeterchessclub.org.uk/Openings/10openrules.html.  I hope it is acceptable here to re-use another's links - I will post this and then try to find the original post to give the person proper attribution.  This link supports the concepts shared about learning the  principles behind the moves.  The original post that shared the link above came from member swestland in this article ...

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-openings/how-i-can-improve-my-opening-knowledge

Another source I found is at www.chesscafe.com in Heisman's Novice Nook and the associated archives to those articles- there are at least four articles on opening principles.

In our own Study Plan for the Intermediate (1400-1800), step #1 is to memorize openings!!  Yet most here say this is a waste of time for those less than 1800.  Is this a debatable point?

If you want to memorize lines an easy way to do that is look up the opening on youtube and study the videos.  Easy and free.  Of course a lot of the videos come in a series, mainly because most of the time your opponent will do something else and then you have an entirely different opening.  After that, you must find someone to play through those paticular lines you used, perferinbly someone better than you.  I found that to be a good method.  Rencently I have been studying a certain opening and learned a lot of insights by just playing that opening with someone a lot better than me.  Different moves where made that threw me off, and I was able to learn there what to do in response to those different occurances.  Of course you have to start off with the said opening, and study that.  Only study the variations you are memorizing that paticular "sesson".  Of course this method can be long and tedious to go through, but this is more of an extra curicular activity for me, as my rating isn't high enough to really go deep into openings.  

All I am saying is it couldn't hurt to look up openings if you have the time.  Always try and think of the "why" behind the moves to, so you will remember them, and don't study the exact moves in the games they show you online, but just the attacking ideas and the moves will come to you ingame.

To answer someone's question about not studying openings and is that true for people under 1800.  I know people that are about 1800 or so, and they know less about the openings than I do :D.  End of discussion :D

It just doesn't hurt if you have the time to go over openings.  But the bulk of your study should be tactics and strategy.  I keep putting off learning more tactics, but tactics trainer everyday seems to be a boring chore for me, but that is exactly what i have to do if I want to improve, that and going over a book about positional play.  A good one, and a classic to start off with is My System.  It turns out I pretty much know the first 8 chapters, it just gives me a few more tips, the why behind the error in the thinking of certain "bad moves," and it goes about it at a "different angle" that I already know.  The second part of the book is where the real learning comes in I think, so I am eagerly waiting to get past these first 8 chapters to get onto positional play, the "higher learning" part of the book.

Every time I look at a profile of someone that is rated 1800+ I see there tactics score is through the roof compared to mine.  Whenever I play someone that is a lot higher rated to me I lose to a tactic.  Quite simple actually the tactics I lose to, but the errors I and most people make are in response to a defense or a lack of coordination of the pieces, or to get rid of a monster piece of your opponent, an unaware he moves away the piece and an unexpected tactic comes to play...  It's hard to always remember to give your king breathing room, etc, unless you just do it thousands of times in tactics trainer!

I dunno though, I may put off this quest to master a new opening because it might be getting in the way of my progress.  After all I know of two people that are probably rated about 1800 yet they know less about the opening game than I do... I've noticed things about the way they play to, which are inacurrate.  Maybe someday I will get rid of the errors in my games to get to the level of play they are and then learn to capitalize on those mistakes I notice they make in their games, I will probably be able to beat them finally!  A lot of it is that we are playing speed chess.  I am apparently not good at it. (I'm a lot better at long game)  But I never play long game!!!  Right now my focus is to play a lot of 10 minute games and do a lot of tactics training as well as read my system, and play 30|15 from time to time to get used to playing at longer time controls.  I learned from reading a book by Dan Heisman that a lot of it is just not learning to make the best move possible every move.  Heisman, in his book teachings an algorithm to use when coming up with a chess move to make the best possible move with the time alloted.  The idea is that when you play just speed chess like me you don't develop the skillset that Dan Heisman teaches in his books, there simply isn't enough time to do so.  The goal will be to play enough long games to where you've practiced the skill a lot and also have those games burned in your memory, because you thought a lot about those moves in your games, so when you play speed chess you just simply remember what to do instintaniously.

Someone mentioned Dan Heisman's Novice Nook columns, also he has a free site.  You could google his name and find it.  Also, there is a book, called chess improvement, which teaches all the main principles of all his novice nook Columns.

All of us have our own knowledge base.  All of us come from a different place.  Only you know what is exactly best for you.  I would advize you to just look at this information you are getting and pick what best suits you, after all, you are the one who needs to get better, and you know what will best work for yourself better than any of us.

In a 2006 GM John Nunn book, in connection with opening study, it is stated that, if a "book contains illustrative games, it is worth playing these over first", and the reader was also advised, "To begin with, only study the main lines - that will cope with 90% of your games, and you can easily fill in the unusual lines later."

In one of his books about an opening, GM Nigel Davies wrote (2005), "The way I suggest you study this book is to play through the main games once, relatively quickly, and then start playing the variation in actual games. Playing an opening in real games is of vital importance - without this kind of live practice it is impossible to get a 'feel' for the kind of game it leads to. There is time enough later for involvement with the details, after playing your games it is good to look up the line."

In a 2010 book, GM Andrew Soltis wrote, "... good books can [give a clear verbal description of what an opening is all about] ... If there isn't any text - if it's all just moves - then this isn't the book for you."

"... a good opening book can open up new vistas that you would probably not discover for yourself. ... I feel that the main reasons to buy an opening book are to give a good overview of the opening, and to explain general plans and ideas. ..." - GM John Nunn (2006)

Not to sound crass/rude or anything and no offense intended... Just want to understand the reasoning behind this.

I see this often. like folks say, do not learn openings until you are like 1800.... are you all saying that those who achieved 1800 ELO, did so, without opening knowledge? Cause, add  another +200 elo rating it is equivalent of a Candidate Master.

Of course, learning and understanding tactics/defense/offense strategies are paramount at any level... 

But, I cannot even imagine, how one could get to 1800 without knowing openings?

Maybe I am missing something.

You should study a few openings first. Then play those openings in your next games. The more you will play those openings, it will help you to memorize.