What is the best way to build a chess opening repertoire?

There are many ways to build a chess opening repertoire. I want to share with you my personal approach and I’m looking forward to hear from you how you build your opening repertoire.

In a nutshell my approach looks like this:

1. Finding some openings for white and black I like in general (= fits my playing style). I’m doing this either by searching opening databases online, going to a bookstore and browsing through some opening books or asking some other chess players.
2. Looking for chess books covering these openings and buying them (making sure I cover all potential systems which my opponent could play).
3. Reading through these books and figuring out which middle game positions I like.
4. Checking which move orders enforce these middle games. This is actually the most time consuming and complicated part for me, but it is also quite interesting and satisfying.
5. Entering all candidate moves into Chess Position Trainer (that means I only enter one candidate move for my side and all potential replies covered by the book for the opponent side).
6. Start training my opening(s) which helps to remember what I just learned.
7. Going online and playing some blitz games to practice once I feel confident.
8. Running these blitz games against my repertoire and checking where I or my opponent deviated from my repertoire.
9. Unless I just forgot my candidate move I will add the opponents move and research for a good reply. At this point I start using a chess engine for the first time in the process.
10. Playing my new opening over the board.
11. Analyzing my game by running it against my repertoire and using a chess engine.

That’s more or less how I built my own repertoire (and still extend it). As you can see I’m hardly using any chess engines for a long time in the process and actually no game database at all. I must be an exotic! However, this approach helped me to build a repertoire which let me gain an ELO of >2,000 (transforming my German DWZ into ELO) and it would be even higher if I would practice and learn more chess than developing chess software (not to mention my non-existing endgame knowledge). I can hear you saying selflessly that the current rating is OK!  :)

Game databases matter?

Like I said I’m not really using game databases to build my repertoire today. I don’t claim they are not important. Indeed I use game databases for game preparation and there are many scenarios where I can see a clear benefit (e.g. creating a repertoire of a GM playing my opening or getting ideas for middle game positions etc.). However, I wonder how much they matter for creating an opening repertoire for the average chess player with limited time.

Speeding up the process

You can save some time and money if you buy repertoire books. In this case the author made most of the work for you and selected the most promising lines instead of covering all moves for both sides for each position. That’s a pretty reasonable approach for non-professional chess players. You can substitute specific opening systems by something else later anyway, but you quickly build a solid repertoire.

The process of entering all candidate moves is quite time consuming I have to admit, but it also ensures you really go through all variations. However, since chess publishers started offering eBooks which come with a PGN file you can also just buy these and save time.

It would be even better if chess publishers would offer eBooks in a CPT native database format. Let them know to increase the probability!

Another approach: importing games

Recently I have received several emails from chess players who wanted to import something like 10,000 games of a specific opening, but they had problems as the performance was going down during the import. What’s your guess how many unique positions can be reached by “just” 10,000 games? Well, I couldn’t believe it myself, but we are talking about 1,000,000 unique (!) positions. And that is just for one opening (e.g. French with White)!

The first thing I recommend is to limit the import to just the first 15 to 20 moves. However, we are still talking about several hundred thousand unique positions then.

Now, I could improve the import performance, but then again I wonder how this approach can be efficient anyway. I mean, somehow you have to go through all positions and decide for each position which move should be your candidate move (and delete the others). On which information are you going to make this decision anyway? Number of played occurrences? Chess engine analysis?

I would prefer the analysis and evaluation by a GM.

However, importing games can be a practical approach if you do it in a more sensible way. In the past I’m across a nice video by Katar demonstrating this process with an older version of Chess Position Trainer. Although Chess Position Trainer 4 changed quite a bit, the same principles can be applied:

Chess Video by Katar about Chess Position Trainer 3.3

I really like this video and I’ve learned quite a few things myself. I plan to create some videos about Chess Position Trainer 4 too. So, any suggestions for topics are welcome!

To get back to the original topic: how do you create your own chess opening repertoire?