Opening training

the study plan for intermediate players says we should learn the first ten moves of the openings and i'm pretty sure they're right

pfren is an obvious troll and relatively boring

Give the guy a break - he was probably trying to be helpful. For anyone with pfren's outlook on chess, which includes many people here, it was good advice imho. However, it should also be noted that not everyone shares his attitude to chess.

As for the original question, here are a couple of suggestions:

http://www.chesspositiontrainer.com/

http://www.bookup.com/

ChessPositionTrainer is really good

pfren is the man. he tells it like it is. he just leaves out a lot of other useful information as well. in this specific case, it would have been nice if he happened to have found the time to write one other sentence that states what a 'player of OP's level' should be studying.

i could never get chess position trainer to work. kept crashing so i gave up on it. too bad because it looked like it would be helpful.

Pick an opening as white, and a response to e4 and d4 as black. Go get one good, well reviewed book on each from someplace like Gambit or Everyman, and learn those systems. 

Play them till you are getting beat because of a lack of opening knowledge. 

If you want a tool to help train yourself, the suggestions of chess position trainer and bookup are excellent. 

Kasparov's books where not written with the average chess player in mind :) 

If you are interested in openings, I would recommend Chess Openings for Dummies.

It's a solid book. The "dummy" thing is a marketing gag. I have books in this series for calculus, golf, trading options, estate planning, etc.

Yes indeed, why should anyone care if he loses his precious time doing something useless like enjoying himself rather than truly improving his chess? It's his loss (or gain).

Tmattb86, Dan Heisman gives some excellent advice on learning openings (its appropriateness for various ability levels and how to approach it) in his Novice Nook column articles, freely available on the web and helpfully assembled into book form if you're into books. For example:

Learning Opening Lines and Ideas

from

http://home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Articles/Novice_Nook_Links.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Chess-Improvement-Best-Novice/dp/1857446496

(Heisman also has something to say about the importance of having fun.)

I am no great player for sure and my chess would likely do well to study things other than the opening. But Switching openings and learning new openings can be a breath of fresh air. Also it has been scientifically proven that losing a game from the opening can be 2-10xs as frustrating as losing a game in the end or middle game. Also winning a game where you continue to build on a slight gain you get in the opening is IMO a very rewarding game - especially if it involved executing on general plans you had in the opening.

On the other hand studying openings can also be more addictive with very little payoff and often the ideas are hard to grasp. No doubt for people who really want to get better openings generally should not be the focus.

Since I am not a great player and have sort of come to terms with that, I still study the occassional opening. The openings I have found that give me a solid plan are the stonewall and the gurgenidze (which I play starting with g6 instead of c6.)

http://www.chess.com/opening/eco/B15_Caro_Kann_Defense_Gurgenidze_System

Also the benko gambit is another good strategic opening.

Its interesting that Dan Heisman focuses in on 9.h3 versus 9.d4 in the ruy lopez opening. I generally study openings so that I get general ideas of pawn structure. This tells me where to attack/defend and know what moves will frustrate those general plans so I need to go for different plans.

GM Yasser Seirawan has been presenting some lessons on opening theory (both general and specific) here recently:

http://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub/videos?view=0&shelf_index=0&sort=dd

I reckon he's a darn good teacher.