My new opening repertoire

Introduction

Welcome to another post on my blog. Today I'm going to introduce you to the plans for my new opening repertoire. In a previous post I introduced you to my chess plans for 2025. You can read about them here. One of them is the creation of a opening repertoire.

Up to now I have played chess with almost no knowledge of any opening theory. As long as I had a low rating it was enough to find good moves on my own. But when I got a ranking of 1900 on chess.com, I noticed that I often had a worse position after opening, which made me lose many games. So I decided that from the new year I will start to work on openings. At my level it is essential.

My plans for the new opening repertoire

Now I will tell you what openings I want to play.

With White I want to play 1.e4. I've been trying to play 1.d4 for the last few months, but I'm not very good in positions like this. I also don't want to play the most popular openings with a lot of theory, I prefer to start with something less common. So my choice is the Scotch Game. It is a nice opening in which you can play aggressively, but there are also calm variants.

Of course the Scotch Game is only an answer to 1...e5, I still have to work out something for the Sicilian Defense (1...c5), the French Defense (1...e6), the Caro-Kann Defense (1...c6) and the Pirc Defense (1...d6). At the moment I don't know what I will play against them, I will deal with that in the future. For now there are more important things to work on.

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Now let's move on to Black. Here I have to choose two openings, one against 1.e4 and the other against 1.d4. So far I have been playing the French Defense against 1.e4, a year ago I bought a beginner's course about it. I decided not to play it anymore because the knowledge from the course is too little for my level and I don't feel so comfortable in closed positions anymore.
My new opening against 1.e4 will be the Sicilian Defense: Hyperaccelerated Dragon.
Against 1.d4 I don't know any theory, so I have to learn something. I have chosen the Slav Defense: Chebanenko Variation.

So these are my plans for a new opening repertoire.

How will I learn openings?

First, I will find a source of knowledge about a particular opening. It will probably be a course on the Internet. Then I will create studies on Lichess, in which I will put all the moves with comments and game plans. Once I have developed a particular opening, I will start to memorize it. Then I'll play practice games to test my knowledge of the moves and game plans.

Ending

That's all for today. If you have any questions or advice, leave a comment.

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