Blitz, Rapid and Classical Need Different Repertoires
The same opening is a different proposition at three minutes and at ninety. Most players never adjust, and it costs them.
Product news and training guides
Chess Prep Pro blog
App updates and practical ideas to help you build and remember a reliable chess opening repertoire.
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FEN Explained for Chess Players
FEN is the companion to PGN. PGN records a game, FEN records a single position, and knowing it saves a surprising amount of time.
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Turning a Lichess Study Into a Trainable Repertoire
Importing a study takes seconds. Turning it into something that survives in memory takes three deliberate steps.
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Why Your Training Results and Game Results Disagree
Training asks an easier question than a game does. Knowing exactly how it is easier tells you how to close the gap.
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Understanding or Memorising Chess Openings?
You need both, and they fail in different ways. Knowing which one you are short of tells you what to do next.
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Should You Copy a Grandmaster's Repertoire?
Copying the moves is easy. The conditions that make those moves work are the part nobody hands over.
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Building a Repertoire Around a System
System openings trade variety for repetition. That is a real saving and a real limit, and both are worth understanding before you commit.
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What to Do When Your Opponent Leaves Book on Move Four
You will be out of preparation more often than in it. Four defaults get you a normal position with better pieces.
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How to Annotate Your Own Opening Lines
Most repertoire notes repeat what the engine said. The useful ones record the reason, which is the part you will have forgotten.
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The Openings That Stop Working as You Improve
Far more openings grow with you than collapse. The ones that collapse have something specific in common.
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How to Add a Trap Without Becoming a Trap Player
Traps are worth having and easy to overweight. One rule keeps them in proportion.
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Scholar's Mate and Why It Stops Working
Scholar's Mate is the first trap almost everyone meets. The interesting part is not how it works, but how quickly it stops.
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Every Chess Opening Trap Works Exactly Once
Opening traps have a measurable expiry date. Knowing where it falls tells you how much of your study time they deserve.
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What a Chess Engine Is For, and What It Is Not
An engine answers a question about the position. It answers no question about you, which is why the highest evaluation is often the wrong choice.
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Masters Games or Online Games: Which Database Should You Trust?
Master games concentrate on best play. Online games spread across everything playable. Which you prepare against depends on who you are playing.
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The Most Popular Move Is Often Not the Best One
Opening statistics show what people play, not what is correct. The difference between the two is the most useful thing in the database.
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Transpositions: Why Your Repertoire Is Smaller Than It Looks
Move orders are the most common reason a line you know refuses to come back. Thinking in positions rather than sequences fixes it.
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Repertoire Debt: The Lines You Added and Never Learned
The positions in your repertoire that you have never actually trained are not preparation. They are a bill you have not paid.
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When to Prune a Chess Opening Repertoire
Rarity is not the same as harmlessness. A method for cutting a repertoire back without losing the lines you actually need.
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How Big Should a Chess Opening Repertoire Be?
The size of a repertoire is not a matter of ambition. It is set by how much review time you have, and the arithmetic is simple enough to do once.
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How Deep Should You Study a Chess Opening?
Depth in an opening repertoire has a cost and a falling return. The multiplication that shows where the line is worth stopping.
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How Often Should You Review Chess Openings?
A review schedule for opening lines, with the actual intervals and the reasoning behind each one.
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Why You Forget Chess Openings
Recognising a move as correct and finding it yourself are two different abilities. Opening study usually trains the wrong one.
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PGN Files Explained for Chess Players
PGN is the plain-text format every chess program agrees on. Here is what is inside one and how to move your games between apps.
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How to Choose Which Chess Openings to Play
Choosing openings is a decision about what kind of positions you want to play, not about which line the engine likes best.
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Chess Opening Principles That Actually Matter
Five opening principles that carry most of the weight in the first ten moves, explained in terms of what they are actually for.
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Introducing Smart Train: Spaced Repetition for Chess Openings
Smart Train adds performance-based spaced repetition to Chess Prep Pro, helping you focus practice on repertoire positions that need more attention.
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Chess Prep Pro Now in Multiple Languages
Chess Prep Pro has added translations for players around the world, including translated downloadable repertoires and annotations.
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Chess Prep Pro Now Optimized for Landscape Mode | Perfect for Tablets and iPads
Landscape mode makes Chess Prep Pro easier to use on larger screens, with more room for repertoire review, analysis, and training.
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Chess Prep Pro Now Available on iOS | New Features and Updates
The iOS version of Chess Prep Pro received the features already available on Android, including repertoire downloads and expanded training tools.