The first few moves in the chess opening lays the foundation for every chess game. Most of the chess openings have been named and analyzed for hundreds of years. It is important if you want to be successful in chess to be familiar with some of the most popular openings and understand the theory behind the moves. In this section we cover everything you need to know about the most popular chess openings. The boards below will let you know if the opening is offensive or defensive. Once you find the opening you want, click to watch an in depth video and see some of the famous chess games that have been played using that opening.
Many beginners ask what they should study first. While it’s important to understand concepts more than memorizing moves of a particular opening there are a few specific openings that all chess players should start with because they are so widely played. For white, a player should first learn the King’s Gambit, Queen’s Gambit, Ruy Lopez and the English. For black, a player should first learn the Sicilian Defense, French Defense, Scandinavian, and the Slav.
It’s important for any chess player to figure out what type of strategy they like to play. Each opening has a very different play style. Once someone determines what type of game they like to play they can then learn other openings that lead to those type of games.
A chess opening theory table or ECO table (Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings) presents lines of moves, typically (but not always) from the starting position. Notated chess moves are presented in the table from left to right. Variations on a given line are given horizontally below the parent line.
If you would like to filter the openings by a specific move you can click the move below:
- There is a large body of theory regarding how the game should be played in each of these phases, especially the opening and endgame. Those who write about chess theory, who are often also eminent players, are referred to as 'theorists' or 'theoreticians'.
- Chess opening training and opening repertoire management. Welcome to the Chesstempo opening training tool. The opening trainer allows you create and manage your opening repertoire, and then train against your repertoire using spaced repetition to optimise your learning. The opening training also integrates with our play chess online feature, allowing you to get.
- Chess openings are a grand project of humanity, stretching back in history and filled with theory, experience, and most importantly, passion and love for the game of chess. There are over a 1,000 chess openings variations, but much less than that are used by the majority of chess players worldwide.
Chesspublishing.com is an online publisher of chess opening theory. We employ 10 GMs and 4 IMs who publish monthly opening articles, downloadable PGN files, PDF eBooks and playable eBooks.
The updates are also available to subscribers on the free Forward Chess app, for iOS and Android.
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