A Different Approach to Chess Improvement

Opening First: A Different Approach to Chess Improvement

Every chess improvement guide eventually arrives at the same list. Solve tactics every day. Study endgames. Analyse your games. Opening preparation comes later — if it appears at all — usually accompanied by a caution: don't spend too much time on it at your level.
At the same time, the chess market produces an enormous volume of opening content. Courses, books, videos — the majority of it consumed by exactly the players who are told not to bother. Someone is giving contradictory advice. It may not be the players who are wrong.

Every single chess game — without exception — begins with an opening. Not a middlegame. Not an endgame. An opening.

The Golf Lesson Nobody Gives

Imagine a golf coach who tells a new student: focus on your approach shots and your putting. That is where most strokes are won and lost. The tee shot? Just get it roughly in play — you can work on that later. For now, the driver is not your priority.
The student follows the advice. He spends months on his short game. Then he plays a round and drives the ball into the rough on every hole. His beautiful putting stroke is irrelevant. He is not putting from 200 metres.
Every hole in golf begins with a tee shot. Every chess game starts with the opening

The Logic Problem

The standard improvement sequence assumes you will reach a position where your training is relevant. It assumes developed pieces, a safe king, and some idea of a plan. None of that is guaranteed. It depends entirely on how you played the first 10 or so moves.
Play those moves poorly — into a structure you don't understand, against a response you haven't seen — and you are in serious trouble before the middlegame begins. The tactics you trained, the endgame technique you studied: none of it matters because you never got there.

A playable middlegame position is not a reward for studying tactics.
Good opening preparation does not only prevent bad positions. It creates good ones deliberately. When you reach a position you have studied, you have a plan. Your opponent, who may not have prepared, is reacting to you. You have control.

The Problem with Choice

Most opening books and courses present options. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3, White can consider several continuations — the Italian, the Ruy Lopez, the Scotch — each with its own character, each with branching sub-variations, each requiring the player to judge which is most appropriate for the position and their style.
This is fine for a titled player with the experience to make those judgments correctly.
The freedom to choose is only useful if you can choose well.

RBOTChess takes a different approach. For each position in the opening tree, there is one recommended move — engine-selected, calibrated to the actual responses of opponents at your specific rating level.
No branching choices to evaluate under time pressure. No judgment calls about which variation suits your style.
One move, with an annotation explaining why it is played, what it achieves, and how it connects to the broader strategy of the opening.

On Engine Recommendations

A reasonable question: why trust an engine over the recommendations of experienced players and coaches?
The answer is that the strongest engines now play at a level no human can match, and this has been true for long enough that it has changed how preparation works at every level. Opening recommendations in books and courses are increasingly engine-verified — the moves suggested are moves the engine endorses. The human contribution is the explanation and the selection of what to cover, not the evaluation of which move is strongest.
RBOTChess makes that process explicit. The engine selects the move. The annotation provides the explanation. The opening tree is built not from theoretical best play but from the actual games of players at your rating level — showing what opponents at 1400, 1600, 1800, and 2000 actually play, and the optimal response to each. Theory calibrated to the opponents you will face today, not to opponents you will meet when you have improved.

Memorisation With Understanding

There is a common objection to memorising opening moves: that it produces players who follow lines mechanically without understanding what they are doing, and collapse the moment an opponent deviates.
This objection is valid against rote memorisation without context. It does not apply to opening preparation that explains the purpose of every move — why this square, why this piece, what the pawn structure is aiming for, which pieces need to be exchanged and which should be kept.
When you know that 3.e3 in the London prepares Bd3, supports the centre, and keeps the bishop's diagonal open — not just that 3.e3 is the move — a deviation by your opponent does not leave you lost. You understand the position well enough to respond to it. Memorisation and understanding are not opposites. Memorisation of annotated moves, grounded in strategic explanation, is how opening knowledge actually transfers to the board.

Tactics Belong in Context

Generic tactical training — solving puzzles drawn from random games in random positions — builds pattern recognition that is genuinely useful. But tactical patterns that arise specifically from your opening structures are more useful still, because they are the patterns you will actually encounter.
A player who opens with the London System will face specific pawn structures, specific piece placements, specific attacking and defensive patterns. Studying those patterns — in the context of positions that arise from the opening you actually play — connects tactical training directly to the games you are preparing for. It is not a replacement for general tactics work. It is a more efficient use of the same time.

Your Personal Training Plan

The right opening repertoire depends on who you are — your rating, your playing style, your available time, and the specific weakness that is costing you the most points. A plan that does not account for these variables is a plan for a hypothetical average player, not for you.
For registered users, RBOTChess provides a training plan generator that takes these variables as input and produces a personalised schedule — phased over months, with concrete weekly targets, opening recommendations (based on your style profile), and a key rule matched to your specific weakness profile. A downloadable Excel tracking sheet, pre-filled with your personal targets and schedule, is included so you can follow your progress over time.
How to get your personal training plan:

Start with getting your player style profile at chessiverse.com in "Find Your Chess Style"

Then

1. Register for free at RBOTChess.
   Go to rbotchess.com and create a free account. You get immediate access to the complete London System — opening tree, strategy and gameplan documents, piece maps, 200 downloadable winning games, and Guess the Move training.
2. Open the training plan generator.
   Answer eight questions about your rating, target, available time, playing style, and training history. The generator produces a personalised plan with a daily schedule, phase targets, and opening recommendations matched to your style.
3. Start with the opening.
   Work through the London System strategy document first — understand the ideas before you train the moves. Then train the opening tree until the responses are automatic. Then play games.
4. Connect your tactics training.
   Use ChessTempo or Lichess to focus on tactical patterns that arise from your specific opening structures. Context makes pattern recognition stick faster.

Conclusion

The contradiction at the heart of chess improvement advice — skip the openings, but here is another opening course — exists because the advice is incomplete, not because players are irrational. Every game begins with an opening. Preparation that starts there, explains the purpose of every move, and connects directly to the middlegame structures and tactical patterns that follow, is not a shortcut or an indulgence. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

The complete London System — opening tree, strategy and gameplan documents, piece maps, 200 downloadable winning games, and Guess the Move training — is free with registration at rbotchess.com. Premium subscribers get access to 14 additional openings, selected by statistical popularity across Lichess rating levels.
Stefan Rebner is the developer of RBOTChess (Rating Based Opening Training), a platform for opening preparation built around Lichess game data at specific rating levels, using top engine analysis applied to opponent move frequencies at each rating level rather than to theoretical best play. Previous articles in this series: What Your Opening Book Doesn't Know About Your Opponents and Where Do the Pieces Go? — both available on Lichess. Comments and feedback on the methodology are welcome.