Intermediate Blitz Player to Chess Blogger with the #1 Hottest Study in 2 weeks

Opening Champion Studies - the Best Way to Learn Openings in 2024

Two weeks ago I started my chess blog with a mission. I believe that innovative Opening Champion studies powered by LichessTools are the BEST way to learn openings in 2024. The idea is simple: take your favorite online blitz player, package their games into studies with LichessTools, and drill their opening repertoire with a spaced-repetition philosophy.

I was interested in this topic for years without much to show for it. The tide slowly started to come in with the advent of the lichess player's database. From there, it was possible to manually create opening champion studies. But doing so would take many hours, far too long to produce such studies at any volume. At great expense of time, I created a few champion studies for my own personal collection and left it there.

Enter LichessTools

Along came the incredible LichessTools browser extension and my dreams for these studies have come true! It is now possible to churn out these highly instructive Opening Champion Studies in a short time frame. And I'm thrilled to help popularize these studies as an alternative to paid opening courses and to spread the word about the wonders of LichessTools.

Opening Champion Studies Rocket to the Top

My study "Play the Caro-Kann like IM Levy Rozman" has hit the #1 hottest study on lichess with fantastic feedback. Three other Opening Champion Studies are also quite popular and have hit the front page of the hot study list including:

• Play the Jobava-London like GM Jobava (Namesake Series)
• Play the Vienna Game like Hikaru (Blitz Repertoire Series - Hikaru Edition)
• Play the Evans Gambit like GM Sergei Zhigalko (Opening Champion Series)

And there's plenty of gems that are just waiting to be discovered by a wider audience and can be easily accessed in my growing catalogue of champion studies, such as:

• Play the Smith-Morra Gambit like IM Marc Esserman
• Play the Queen's Gambit like WFM Anna Cramling
• Play the Latvian Gambit like BetterCollSoul

The rapid success of these Opening Champion Studies is all the more remarkable given that I started from a baseline of near-zero visibility or social presence on the site. In other words, the success of the Opening Champion Studies likely has to do with high demand for learning openings from our chess blitz heroes and the quality of the studies. Rather than whatever little influence I was bringing to the table in getting the project off the ground.

I believe that Opening Champion Studies are the wave of the future and could soon compete with the paid opening industry for the attention of the chess improvement community, as I will explain in a forthcoming post. I hope that you check them out!

Play the Caro-Kann like IM Levy Rozman (Stars of Chess Series)

Study:

Notes:

• Add Lichess Tools to unlock all the games in the champion studies.
• Massive credit to TotalNoob69 for developing LichessTools and starting the "Play Like..." series with his own collection of fun studies.

Cheers, Dsoul