How to Choose Which Chess Openings to Play

The question is not which opening is best

Engines rate almost every sensible first move as roughly equal. At the level any of us play at, the difference between the London System and the Catalan is not a fraction of a pawn. It is what kind of game you will be asked to play, over and over, for years.

So the question is not which opening is strongest. It is which positions you want to keep finding yourself in.

Start from the games you already enjoy

Look at your last twenty or thirty games and pick out the ones you enjoyed, win or lose. Not the ones you won on a blunder. The ones where you understood what was happening and had a plan.

Were they open positions with pieces flying about? Slow games where you improved one piece at a time? Attacks on the king, or endgames you ground out?

Whatever comes back is a strong signal. Openings are a delivery mechanism for position types. The ones that keep delivering positions you handle well are the ones to build on.

What people at your level actually play

Before you choose, it helps to know what you will be meeting. The Lichess opening explorer records how much of the board every opening takes at each rating, and the shape of those curves says more than any single number.

Three patterns, and each one tells you something different.

Some openings only exist at the bottom. The Wayward Queen Attack, the 2. Qh5 line that goes hunting for Scholar’s Mate, takes 4.49% of games at 400 and 0.02% at 2500. Nothing refutes it at a particular rating. It simply stops working once defenders recognise the pattern, and the players who leaned on it move on.

Some grow the whole way up. The Sicilian d6 systems climb from 0.28% to 5.32%, a nineteenfold rise. The Caro-Kann more than doubles. These are openings that repay study, which is exactly why the players who study end up in them.

Some are U-shaped. The Ruy Lopez peaks around 1200, dips through the middle, and comes back at the top. Beginners play it because it is the first thing they are taught. Strong players play it because it is genuinely good. The players in between drift off to something sharper and come back later.

A separate look at how openings score across rating ranges, published on Lichess, shows the same thing from the other direction. The Sicilian goes from scoring well for Black at lower levels to scoring better for White higher up, and the Queen’s Gambit Accepted goes from over 56% for White at the bottom to the worst-scoring line for White at the top.

Treat the shapes as reliable and the exact figures as a snapshot. These are online blitz and rapid games from one site, counted by ECO code, so a single Sicilian system is not the whole Sicilian. You can check the current numbers yourself in the Lichess opening explorer, which filters by rating band.

The practical use is narrow but real. It tells you which replies your repertoire has to answer first, and it warns you off openings whose whole value is that your opponent has not seen them yet.

Sharp or solid is an honest trade

Openings sit on a spectrum, and both ends are viable.

Sharp openings produce positions where the move order matters and one inaccuracy can lose on the spot. They reward preparation heavily. Against an unprepared opponent you can be winning by move twelve. Against a prepared one you can be lost by move twelve.

Solid openings produce positions where understanding matters more than memory. You are less likely to be blown off the board, and more likely to reach a middlegame where general skill decides things.

Neither is better. But be honest about your study time. A sharp opening with no preparation behind it is the worst of both worlds. You take the risk without the reward.

Which style rewards preparation most

The sharp and solid ends of that spectrum do not just play differently. They repay study differently, and that matters more than most people expect.

Sharp lines pay the most for preparation. In a forcing position there is often only one move that holds, and knowing it in advance is the entire point of a repertoire. Every hour you put into a Najdorf line converts almost directly into points, because the alternative is finding that single move at the board with a clock running. The cost is symmetrical. A sharp opening you have not prepared is worse than no opening at all.

Solid systems ask for less and forgive more. In a London or a Caro-Kann there are usually two or three reasonable moves in any given position, so understanding covers for gaps in memory. A repertoire still helps, but it helps by saving time rather than by saving the game.

Offbeat lines buy a practical edge that shrinks as you climb. Below roughly 1800, a sound but unusual opening means your opponent is out of book on move three and you are not. Higher up they stop being surprised, and what remains is the objective quality of the position. That is why the offbeat choices worth making are the ones that are sound rather than merely rare.

One rule of thumb follows from this. The sharper your repertoire, the more of your study time goes into maintaining what you already have rather than into learning something new.

How much theory can you actually maintain?

This is the constraint everyone underestimates. A repertoire is not built once. It is maintained. Lines you learned in March are gone by June unless you revisit them.

Whatever you can review comfortably in the time you really have each week is the size of repertoire you can hold. If that is fifteen minutes, a narrow repertoire of solid systems will serve you far better than a broad theoretical one you half remember.

One reply to 1. e4 that you know properly beats three you know vaguely.

White and Black are different jobs

It is often said that Black has more to prepare. That is only half true, and the half that is true is worth being precise about.

As White you choose the first move, so you choose the kind of game. What you do not choose is the reply. Open with 1. e4 and you still need an answer to the Sicilian, the French, the Caro-Kann, 1… e5, the Scandinavian and the Pirc, and the Sicilian alone can branch further than most players expect.

As Black you do not even choose the ground. You need something ready for 1. e4, 1. d4, 1. c4 and 1. Nf3 before you have played a move of your own.

So both sides need broad coverage. The real asymmetry is control: your White repertoire steers every game you play with White toward positions you picked, while your Black repertoire has to answer whatever arrives.

Two practical consequences. First, White repertoires reward depth, because you will reach the same positions constantly. Second, most players are noticeably better prepared with White than with Black, which means Black is usually where the cheap improvement is sitting.

Watch the move order

Openings are not sequences. They are positions that several sequences arrive at.

This catches people who learned a line as a list of moves. Play the moves in a different order and the memorised list stops matching, even though the position on the board is one you know perfectly well.

The fix is to think in positions. When you add a line, ask what the position is for rather than what comes next, and you will recognise it whichever road you took to get there. Software that recognises transpositions helps, but the understanding is what makes it usable.

Test it before you commit

You do not have to decide in the abstract. Before building a repertoire around an opening, play it for a week in fast games and pay attention to two things: whether you know what to do around move twelve, and whether you enjoyed the position you got.

A week of blitz will not teach you the theory. It will tell you whether the structures suit you, which is the part that theory cannot fix later.

Reputation is a poor guide

Two traps here.

The first is choosing an opening because a strong player uses it. Their choice reflects their preparation time, their opponents and their style. The Najdorf works for a grandmaster with a second and a database. It does not transfer automatically.

The second is avoiding an opening because someone called it bad. Openings described as dubious are usually dubious against precise preparation. The London System has been dismissed for decades and scores perfectly well, because the positions are pleasant to play and easy to understand. At the board, that matters more than a theoretical assessment nobody can reproduce.

When switching is worth it

Changing openings throws away everything you have already learned, so it needs a real reason. Good ones:

• You keep reaching positions you do not understand. An opening that hands you a structure you have no plan in is doing you harm, whatever its reputation.
• The same variation keeps beating you. If you cannot fix it, changing the branch is legitimate.
• Your goals changed. Wanting sharper games than your current system produces is a real reason.

Bad reasons: losing one game in an opening you otherwise like, or reading that the line is slightly worse. Both are noise.

If you do switch, switch one thing at a time. Replacing a whole repertoire at once means months of playing every game out of preparation.

Write the decision down

Whatever you pick, the choice only helps if you remember it at the board. That means recording your intended reply to each common move, and revisiting it often enough that it is there when the clock is running.

That record is your opening repertoire. How to build one is a topic of its own, and we cover the practical side in how to build a chess opening repertoire. If you want to keep one on your phone and drill it, Chess Prep Pro is what we build.