How Many Openings to Study at a Time?

Currently I'm jumping from one to the other. Is it best to just focus on one at a time?

That depends. Do you like to play all sorts of openings in your games? Or would you like to just learn a couple really well, so that you can take advantage of your opponents inaccuracies?

Probably. Hard to say.

There are different things that could all be part of "studying an opening" -- browsing game explorer, replaying master games in an opening, analyzing your old games in an opening, reading a book about it, trying to figure out what the best line is at some point according to you, memorizing the stuff you've decided to play, trying to find and solve typical tactics from the opening...

Probably if you have for instance five master games on some line of an opening, it would make sense to study them together so you can see the similarities. Reading ten different books at the same time can't be very effective. But the rest, who knows?

What do you do to study them?

I remember once playing more than 100 training games in the velimirovic attack of the classical sicilian ( 5-0 games ) with another NM who also played both sides of this opening as part of our "learning" process and it helped us both. I  think such training games are great for learning an opening if you can find a willing opponent. Its not always easy to find such an opponent though. We also played a few ( maybe 10 or so ) classic time control games as part of our training as well...... To play such games try to get an opponent that is a little stronger than you but not too much stronger. It will be difficult though if the opening you want to practice isnt also a part of his repertoire.......

Well the aim is to eventually get together a pretty complete repertoir. Learning really well the plans and ideas from a variety of openings. e.g. The typical Sicilian structures, Torre, Colle and London Systems, Queen's Gambit Accepted, Dutch Leningrad etc.

I'm at the level where I think it is appropriate to be now learning loads of in-depth theory but my opening knowledge is in general a bit lacking compared to the rest of my game so I guess I'll have to basically work my way up from almost the bottom on a lot of openings..

At the moment I must admit it's just books.. So you would suggest doing a lot of the extra stuff you mentioned as well?

That sounds really interesting, however I really strongly want to stear clear of any blitz games! For a few reasons I just really don't like them..

Well, that's what I'm telling myself I should do. But I'm really good at figuring out how I should study, and rather bad at actually putting in the effort.

In recent years I've hardly done any serious opening study at all, but before that the big trap was to just memorize some lines and start playing. Of course, I'd have to start thinking for myself in the middle of a sharp position where I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing.

So now what I do is -- play a variation first (OTB), think for myself, and after the game look up what the theory was. Easier to remember that way, and I'll know the "why" behind the moves. And less work than trying to memorize everything. My results have improved remarkably.

What I'd _like_ to do is: make a collection of games in an opening, play through them (paying some attention), _then_ play it and use that book afterwards.

But I use the computer for that, so then I go onto the chess.com forums. With disappointingly little improvement to my openings. I need you guys to write good openings posts!

I gave up playing OTB recently and am solely focusing on turn-based for the foreseeable future, so memorising isn't an issue. If I forget a line I can just look it up again. I guess this means for me it's all about deeply understanding everything I'm playing and looking through lots of games so I can absorb the ideas from the resultant middlegame positions..

So a suitable method I suppose could be just studying lots of instructional games and leaving looking up any necessary theory to when it's needed in one of my current games.

I think from what I've heard I'll for now just concentrate on the Sicilian. As well as Danny Kopec's "Mastering the Sicilian" "Tactics in The Sicilian" by Gennady Nesis could be useful I think..

What you said about creating a book with your own games from that opening sounds like a good thing to do aswell..

Study one opening at time.

With white study main line of 2-4 (against your first move eg. 1d4) openings. In addition select one of them and study some your favorite variation well.

Against 1.e4/d4 one mainline for both and one favorite variation also.

It takes time, don't hurry.