Stop Gatekeeping Opening Study

Why chess players of every rating level should study openings, and what to focus on at each stage

Some of my most improved students over the past 12 years have one thing in common, and it’s probably not what you’d expect. It’s not that they solved the most puzzles, or that they studied endgames religiously, or even that they had the most natural talent. Some of the students who improved the most were the ones who took the time to learn a solid opening repertoire and put in the practice and game repetitions to refine it.

That might surprise you, because if you’ve spent any time in the chess improvement world, you’ve probably heard some version of this advice: “Don’t study openings until you’re at least 1500.” Or “openings don’t matter at your level, just focus on tactics.” This advice gets repeated so often that most people accept it without question.

I think it’s wrong though. Or at least, it’s very incomplete.

I believe players of all levels should be studying openings. The difference isn’t whether you study them, but how you study them and what you focus on at each stage of your development. A beginner’s opening study should look completely different from an advanced player’s opening study, but the idea that beginners should just wing it for the first 10-15 moves and hope for the best doesn’t make much sense either.

The Case Against Ignoring Openings

Here’s the argument that usually gets thrown around: beginners blunder too much in the middlegame and endgame for openings to matter, so they should focus all their energy on tactics and basic checkmates. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Why memorize 15 moves of Sicilian theory if you’re going to hang your queen on move 20?

But this creates a false trade-off. Studying openings doesn’t prevent you from also studying tactics. It’s not one or the other. And there’s a deeper problem with the “just wing it” approach that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Beginners don’t have strong analytical ability (yet!). That’s the whole reason they’re beginners. And the opening phase actually requires a lot of subtle decision-making, because the typical tactical patterns that puzzles train you to spot aren’t really present in the first 10 moves. There are very few puzzles that help you think about what good moves look like in the opening. So when we tell beginners to skip opening study and rely on general principles alone, we’re asking them to use analytical skills they haven’t developed yet during the phase of the game where those skills are arguably the hardest to apply.

The result? They get blown off the board before the middlegame even starts. They lose games in 12 moves to players who know a few basic opening ideas. And after enough of those demoralizing losses, some of them quit. That’s not a training plan, that’s a recipe for frustration.

What Beginners Should Focus On (Below 1100 Rapid on Chess.com)

Beginners don’t need to memorize 20 moves of theory. They need roughly 5 moves of opening knowledge in a few key spots: one opening as white, one response to 1. e4 as black, and one response to 1. d4 as black. That’s it.

For white, I’d recommend starting with 1. e4. It tends to lead to positions that are more open, more tactical, and more attacking, which is exactly the kind of chess that helps beginners learn how pieces interact with each other. These positions create natural opportunities to practice the skills that matter most at this stage.

Beyond those first few moves, beginners should focus on understanding opening principles and general ideas of where to place their pieces. Put your pawns in the center. Develop your pieces. Castle your king to safety. Don’t move the same piece multiple times without a good reason. Don’t bring your queen out too early. Don’t waste time pushing pawns on the side of the board while your pieces sit on the back rank.

But here’s the part that often gets overlooked: beginners should also start learning how to punish opponents who violate these principles. When your opponent doesn’t put pawns in the center, doesn’t develop their pieces, leaves their king stuck in the middle, or blocks their own pieces in with pawns, there are ways to take advantage of that. Sometimes it’s as simple as making solid developing moves yourself and building a lead in tempo and efficiency. Other times, you can look for pawn breaks to open the center and launch an attack against an opponent who is behind in development or whose king is still uncastled.

Black has a big lead in development and should be looking to attack ASAP

I also think there should be an experimentation phase early on, where the player tries different openings and sees what kind of positions they find interesting (assuming the openings are legitimate ones). I wouldn’t recommend relying on opening traps yourself, but learning how to beat common traps is absolutely worthwhile.

Some good resources for this stage include Smithy’s Opening Fundamentals on Chessable and the “Chess Principles Reloaded” series.

What Intermediate Players Should Focus On (1100-1800 Rapid on Chess.com)

Once a player has a basic opening foundation and a general understanding of the principles, the next step isn’t just to memorize more moves. It’s to start understanding why specific moves are played in their openings and how those moves set them up for the middlegame.

This is where I think one of the biggest disconnects exists in how people study openings. A lot of intermediate players memorize the moves of their opening but don’t understand the reasoning behind them. They know that move 7 is supposed to be Bg5, but they couldn’t tell you what that move is trying to accomplish or how it connects to their middlegame plans. When their opponent deviates from the “book” line on move 6, they’re lost, because they were following a sequence of moves rather than understanding a sequence of ideas.

At this level, players should start learning about the middlegame pawn structures that arise from their openings. This is incredibly useful and something that a lot of intermediate players either don’t know how to study or don’t realize is connected to their opening preparation. If you play the Italian Game, you should understand the pawn structures you’re likely to end up with and what your plans are in those structures. If you play the Caro-Kann, you should know what kind of middlegame you’re trying to reach and how to play it once you get there. The opening and the middlegame aren’t separate phases that you study in isolation. They flow into each other, and understanding that connection is a big part of what separates intermediate players from advanced ones.

The “Carlsbad Formation” can occur from the Caro-Kann Exchange Variation

At this stage, players can also start to learn a bit more theory in their specific openings, along with common patterns and the reasons why certain moves are good or bad in those positions.

For resources at this level, I’d recommend “Mastering Opening Strategy” by GM Johan Hellsten, “Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide” by GM Mauricio Flores Rios and the “Every Pawn Structure Explained” video lessons on Chess.com.

What Advanced Players Should Focus On (1800-2100 Rapid on Chess.com)

At the advanced level, opening study starts to look quite different. Advanced players can begin to get more granular about their theory and start slowly crafting their own opening repertoire rather than always following someone else’s recommendations.

What does that look like in practice? It might mean analyzing your own games with an engine and identifying where your opening preparation ran out or where you chose the wrong plan. It might mean using the Lichess database filtered to your rating range to see what similarly-rated opponents are playing in various positions and which moves score best. A Chessable course is still a perfectly good foundation (and probably the simplest way to build a repertoire), but advanced players should be refining and personalizing that foundation based on their own games and analysis. No course covers every possible move in every position, and at this level, you need to be able to think for yourself when you leave the book.

Here’s the key distinction between intermediate and advanced opening study. At the beginner to intermediate level, you don’t necessarily need to get an advantage from the opening, because your opponent will generally make a significant mistake later in the game and hand you the advantage without you needing to do anything special. At the advanced level, that stops happening as frequently. Your opponents make fewer mistakes, the free advantages dry up, and you have to work harder to create winning chances. That’s where deeper opening preparation starts to pay real dividends, because getting a small edge out of the opening can be the difference between having a playable middlegame with real chances and grinding through a dead-equal position where neither side has much to work with.

The Gradient of Opening Study

The mistake in the “don’t study openings” advice isn’t just that it’s wrong. It’s that it treats opening study as one thing when it’s actually a gradient. A beginner learning 5 moves and some basic principles is doing opening study. An intermediate player learning why their moves connect to middlegame pawn structures is doing opening study. An advanced player crafting a personalized repertoire and analyzing deviations is doing opening study. These are all very different activities, but they’re all valuable at the right time.

So rather than telling players to avoid openings until some magic rating threshold, I think the better advice is this: learn openings at every stage of your development, but make sure what you’re studying matches where you are right now. Don’t memorize 25 moves of theory as a beginner, but don’t walk into every game clueless either. Treat the opening as something that evolves with you as you improve, because it should.

If your opening study matches your level, it won’t just help your opening. It’ll improve your middlegame understanding, your tactical awareness, and your overall confidence at the board. And from what I’ve seen coaching students over the past 12 years, that combination is one of the fastest paths to real improvement.

Happy studying!