How do people remember all chess moves in openings?

I can't seem to remember more than two moves for the openings I've tried playing. It seems like there are infinite possible ways, and I can't remember which move is the best against my opponent's move. How did you get past this point, or is this a noob query?

If you find the logic behind each move, you dont have to memorize very much. Also if you focus too much on memorizing you can fall into the trap of not thinking about your moves when you play which can lead to blunders.

Opening moves are based on ideas. remembering the ideas makes it much easier to remember the moves. In the same way that it's easier to remember sentences than a bunch of random words, because sentences make so kind of sense. 

Now some of these ideas may be based on subtle positional plans, or complicated tactics, so understanding them may be beyond your current level--and mine!  But if you try to understand what the two sides are trying to accomplish in a particular opening, you will find it easier to makes sense of the moves and remember them [EDIT: jamesstack made the same points]

I think if you have to memorize moves when you are first learning an opening, its okay but after you have a certain familiarity of the positions you need to try to understand more fully why the moves are played and just as importantly why certain moves are not played. The way I do it is play through the lines a book gives and try to guess what the next move is before I see it in print. Sometimes I consult an engine when I guess wrong...other times I just try to figure things out for myself.

The only opening I have ever endeavored to memorize is the "London."  It is within the Chess.com lessons.... https://www.chess.com/lessons/understanding-the-london-system

To reply specifically to your 'original post,' I can remember it cause it is somewhat logical.

I use the huh... lichess... study platform to save some studies with all the opening lines I have on my repertoire, then from time to time I read them again and again. It's really hard to memorize everything, but it's something you really need to keep seeing. The more I study them the more I find myself skipping stuff when I stidy because I already know it. Maybe someday I'll have all the lines on my head? And of course, you need to keep playing the same lines. Doesn't need to be just one opening, but say a fixed repertoire. If you vary your plays TOO much then you're not really gonna retain anything you studied... 

The way it helps me the most to memorize a specific line is getting it on a game correctly. If I ever get to a good position I studied or if I get to make my opponent fall into a trap, then it's really hard for me to forget the line later.

You don't need to memorize openings to play a good opening, but there are some openings that you will just play a lot more and those are usually worth studying more than others. When you play an opening a lot you will probably just start to remember how to play that opening without needing to study.

So, I personally only play a few openings, and my memorization of the theory isn't very deep, BUT:

When you start playing lots of games with a given opening, you'll start to see and remember patterns that occur again and again on the board.  If you're working on memorizing that opening, you'll either find that what you're memorizing tracks what you see in your games, or you find that the other player will tend to deviate in some predictable ways from what the theoretically best move is.

I personally find that spending my time memorizing one- or two-move best responses to how my opponents deviate from the main line is more practically useful than going deeper into the main line, but that's because at my level most people aren't memorizing their openings that deeply either.

I don't

I just play an opening I feel to play

I think at the higher levels that memorization isnt blind memorizaion most of the time...its more of a by product of spending so many hours trying to understand a position. If they happen to forget something they can probably just think through the position and find all the right moves.

Yeah, understanding why the moves are made makes it easy to remember all sorts of variations.

Of course this is impossible for a beginner, because first they should study endgames, strategy, etc. After that moves will make enough sense to remember.

... and of course, even professional players forget parts of their opening prep. Everyone forgets things here and there.

What I have noticed is that many grandmasters take a long time to make their moves in the opening. I dont doubt they know what every theoretical move is but I dont think they make those moves without thinking about them. GM Alexander Grischuk even spent 72 minutes on the 11th move in one of his games in the most recent candidates tournament.

*

Some Grandmasters play really fast. I observe tournaments from time to time and time and what I have noticed is most GMs take their time even in the opening but there are some exceptions. I dont remember which tournament it was but there was a game between Carlsen and Karjakin that ended in about 20 minutes....an uneventful draw in the Berlin but okay its the Berlin.....it would be really hard to find an improvement over the board in such a heavily analyzed opening. Then a few weeks ago in one of the grand prix events, I saw a game between Aronian and someone where with the increment Aronian had almost as much time as he started with through most of the game while his opponent used a lot of time. Aronian's speed of play elicited a funny comment from one of the commentators," why is he playing so fast? Maybe he wants to go home and eat ice cream?"

Its not just that game though.....In the video about the 72 minute think I seem to remember GM Daniel King saying Grischuk has a reputation for long thinks. The larger point I was making though is its more common for GMs to play slowly than blitz their moves out. I think they play slowly because they are actually thinking about their moves which makes sense to me because not everything in theory can be trusted. Theory is constantly evolving,,,maybe not in something like the Berlin but in other openings they are and if theory is evolving then that means something in theory is  inaccurate or even completely incorrect, so these GMs take a look at the position before they make the memorized move just in case they notice something. Hmmmm I dont think Im going to convince anyone of my point of view and I really should be getting back to work on my chess studies, so I am going to unfollow. Hope you guys have fun discussing. )

Grandmasters may spend time in the opening to recall games that were previously played in the line they are following. This may help them conceptualize ideas and predict what their opponent is going to play. Other times grandmasters have to think through positions when their opponent takes them out of prep. 

But mostly, grandmasters spend lots of time in the opening deciding what to play. There's so many options: Ruy Lopez, Italian, Queen's Gambit; as Black: Sicilian, 1. e5, Queen's Gambit Declined, Slav? What opening will they play? What kind of positions do they, and their opponent seek? How might their opponent react? What is the strength/playstyle of their opponent? Are they going for a safe draw in a tournament? Do they have to go for a win? In short, grandmasters spend LOTS of time in the opening for a variety of reasons. They have to take a lot more into consideration than the average Joe in a chess.com blitz game. 

Just go with the flow...

chessable and lichess studies

I reckon every response in this thread is a 'good answer.' Everyone memorises, but trying to learn multiple openings purely by rote isn't really gonna work unless it's your whole life and you're some kind of savant. Basically, getting the 'why' part is how it gets committed to memory so effectively. You replicate patterns in multitudes of games, repeating those that make you happy and avoid repeating things that didn't. If you wander into unfamiliar territory and suffer for it, analysis will show where you went wrong and you remember not to do that. -Diverging, I think this is where rank beginners are liable to go wrong with 'opening study...' trying to learn more than one at a time, and picking something complex straight away. Trying to memorise 9 moves of opening x, then moving on to some new opening to memorise 9 mainline moves. If you're a casual player pick and stick, you might know that opening in a couple of years...

As others have already pointed out, understanding is better than memorization. On the other hand, if you find out that a certain move can be exploited or leads to an unfavorable position somewhere down the line, you better remember it. Because remembering is easier than calculating the drawbacks of each move from scratch during the game.

In my experience, remembering a move that has no meaning to me proved to be very difficult. I couldn’t even remember the game I just played 15 minutes ago further than move 6 or 7. The only way to remember a move long term was to A) make sure I understand the move and the reasoning behind it and B) Make sure the move has meaning to me.

I started with identifying a few ‘key’ positions. Since I wasn’t able to know entire openings and my opponents threw a lot of random moves at me, my first decision was to ignore most of them and only focus on a couple of main lines. My only goal was to be able to memorize my next move in these key positions. I even tried to give these lines nicknames. Only after I had ‘mastered’ these specific lines would I expand into other lines. That worked for me.

If I look at your opening repertoire, @DarthPhy, it looks like you are not playing moves consistently. I’m not saying you should, but for the purpose of remembering your lines it might help. Let me illustrate. (btw, I’ve only looked at your games on chess.com playing white since 1 January 2022, so just your recent games).

You play d4 (mostly) and the most common reply is d5. Then you play Nc3 in most games. It appears that there are 3 main moves you need to understand. Nf6, e6 and Nc6. Should be easy enough. 

However, after Nf6 you played e3 42 times, Nf3 17 times, Bf4 10 times, e4 5 times, Bg5 3 times, Be3 2 times and h3 1 time.  That’s a lot of variation. If your opponent plays e6 instead of Nf6, you play either e3 Nf3 e4 Be3 Bf4 Ne4 or a3. And if he plays 2. Nc6 you play e3, Nf3 e4, Bf4 Nb5, Be3 or Nxd5 (terrible move, but it was a bullet game). What this means is that after 1.d4 d5 2. Nc3 XXX 3. XXX on move 2.5 you have 21 different positions. Since your opponent has between 3 and 10 different moves to play for each position, you basically have well over a 100 possible positions after move 3 (minus transpositions). That is if you play 2.Nc3, which you don’t always do. You also played 2. Nf3, 2. e3 2. e4, 2. c3, 2. Be3 and 2. g4.

In summary, in your last couple of hundred games you play so many lines, that almost all of your openings are unique, you seldom see positions more than a couple of times. 

Why consistency? If you had played d4 consistently, instead of the 14 different first moves you played, you would have played d4 1,080 times. You would face 1.d5 now 567 times. If you play Nc3 consistently, you would face Nf6 over 200 times (37%). Let’s say you just picked either 3. Bg5 or 3. e4 as your next move, and you studied it, you would be an expert by now, especially since you have played 200 games from that position by now. There is no doubt you would easily be able to remember most of the variations by now. I don’t think you should play a specific line 200 times. But I’m sure that if you play a line 40 times before moving on to the next variation, you’ll be able to remember them a lot easier! Good luck.