How to Remember Your Openings

It's not that complicated, people

I recently recorded an episode of Perpetual Chess. Ben’s been on a streak of episodes that really speak my language, especially Donny Ariel’s appearance, “Can a mid-40s working dad make Grandmaster without doing any work?”

But there was one thing that Donny, Ben, and another guest, Joel Sneed, all said that took me by surprise. They all highlighted remembering opening lines as a unique challenge of being an aging chess player. I can certainly relate to the struggles of remaining competitive as you get older, but I consider memorizing opening lines to be one of the easiest parts of chess improvement, and it’s an area where adults are at a unique advantage.

Adults have the advantage when it comes to remembering opening lines for two reasons. The first is that, having been around for longer, you’ve had more time to learn openings. Of course, if you’re currently an adult and don’t know any openings, this is little consolation. The second is that remembering your openings is mostly a matter of setting up a good process and sticking to it. In other words, it’s about structure and discipline, areas where adults typically have the advantage over kids (with some exceptions, of course).

But let’s talk about how to build a process that guarantees you won’t forget your openings. There are two key components.

Part 1: Spaced Repetition

I have a whole article about spaced repetition, but in a nutshell, it’s a system where you review information at increasing intervals. For example, you might do the first review after a day, the next after three more days, then a week, and so on.

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Spaced repetition is used by lots of people besides chess players, including language learners and medical students who have to remember a huge amount of information about diseases and treatments. There’s a big body of evidence showing it works.

IF YOU ACTUALLY DO IT!!!!!!!!

Despite spaced repetition being the core idea behind Chessable, the most popular chess learning platform, almost no one completes the reviews on schedule. If you use Chessable and can’t finish your reviews, there are two likely causes:

1. You’re learning too much, too fast. You should be able to get your scheduled reviews to zero in 10 minutes a day. If you can’t, you’re adding too much new information too quickly. Reset your course and start over, much more slowly this time.

2. You don’t understand the lines. If you understand a line, spaced repetition will guarantee that you don’t forget it. If you don’t understand the line, no amount of review will help. If you have lines that don’t make sense to you, you need to go in and look at them, either on your own or with the help of a coach or the engine, until they make sense. If you can’t make heads or tails of them, pause the line – it won’t help you anyway. If there are many lines in the course you can’t understand, it means the course is too advanced for you. You need to find a simpler course that makes sense for where you’re at right now. Alternatively, if you prefer to do your own opening preparation, Chessbook makes it easy to train your own lines on a spaced repetition schedule.

Part 2: Blank Slate Drill

Spaced repetition is a great way to ensure you remember individual lines, but it’s also essential to have a sense of the big picture, how everything fits together in a logical way. If you think of your opening repertoire as a forest, then what spaced repetition does is to quiz you on individual trees one-by-one. This is helpful, but if you want to navigate the forest successfully, you also need a top-down view of the whole thing. This is where the Blank Slate Drill comes in.

To do this drill, set a timer for a short amount of time (I recommend 10-30 minutes), open an empty Lichess study or Chessbase file, and enter everything you can remember about your opening preparation in a given line with no hints. This is harder than Chessable reviews, because you are not given the opponent’s move, you have to reconstruct everything for both sides. In order to accomplish this you need a clear story about what’s going on in the opening and the reasons for both sides' moves.

The Blank Slate Drill gives you a clear picture of how much you really know about an opening and where you have problem spots. After completing the drill, you can go back with the engine, your course, or other resources to fill in the gaps. Doing this drill repeatedly will yield huge, noticeable improvement very quickly. As a bonus, if you don’t already have your own opening files, you can use the output of the drill as the start of your file.

Conclusion

Spaced Repetition and The Blank Slate Drill have two things in common: they work, and they’re extremely time-efficient. If you do, for example, 10 minutes/day of spaced repetition review, and 1 hour/month of Blank Slate, you’ll almost never forget your openings.

I’m reminded of a line in Money for Couples, a non-chess book I’m reading: “In my experience, people who say they’ve tried everything usually haven’t tried much.” If you do this process it will work. It’s just that almost no one does it.

I’ll now do something that is very bad writing: conclude the post by totally taking the wind out of your sails. The problem with memorizing opening lines isn’t that it’s hard. Compared to other areas of chess improvement, memorization is easy. The problem is that memorizing more lines probably won’t help you much when it comes to winning more chess games. To do that, you’ll have to change how you think. That’s hard.