How you should build your repertoire

The one question I'm sure almost every single chess player has asked themselves is What on Earth am I supposed to play?

Of course, it's no simple task to build your opening repertoire. There's basically an endless supply of lines you can choose from... but you never seem to find the right one, even after hours of sifting through tons of YouTube videos and flipping more pages of your opening books than you could possibly count.

Although I'm not a wizard of openings who knows what suits you best, here are my tips on how you should develop your repertoire based on your current level.

---

Quick disclaimer — I will use FIDE and USCF ratings to distinguish chess player levels. If you haven't played or don't play OTB tournaments, try to estimate your level as best you can (while keeping your ego in check, of course).

Now that that's out of the way, let's get into it!

Beginner (~1000-1400 FIDE / ~0-1200 USCF)

As a beginner, you should focus on playing a variety of concrete, principled openings that consistently lead to instructive middlegames. Basically, try to play openings that hone essential skills and help you recognize patterns, such as piece development, central dominance, and more.

I strongly recommend trying out a lot of different openings and seeing which you like playing the most. After you're done exploring, your "upper beginner" stage is a good time to narrow your wide array of options to a few openings you're going to play. At this level, you don't need to memorize everything; you mainly need broader conceptual knowledge of your openings.

Here are a few lines I personally recommend for beginners.

Intermediate (~1400-1800 FIDE / ~1200-1800 USCF)

The intermediate level is where your repertoire choices start to matter more for your development, as more and more of your opponents will (obviously) start to actually know theory.

There are two main ways I recommend going about your opening selections. First, you can learn your favorite openings you tried out in your upper beginner stage and see how they work out for you. For example, if you liked playing e4 for White, pick a few concrete openings to learn against ...e5, the Sicilian, the French, and the Caro-Kann, among other lines. You could also look at master games, such as those of Kasparov, and find a few openings that interest you to learn and understand, which I strongly recommend.

At this level, you should still mainly focus on understanding the core concepts behind your repertoire rather than raw memorization. However, you should definitely memorize more lines, refutations, and punishments within your openings as your rating increases.

Here are a couple of openings I recommend for intermediate players.

Advanced (~1800-2200 FIDE / ~1800-2200 USCF)

At the advanced level, playability and solidity within your repertoire become drastically more important than in previous levels.

You probably won't get away with playing some of the openings you used to play because they're unsound against better, more prepared opponents, so you may have to adapt parts of your repertoire. This could mean learning a unique sideline or even a completely new opening.

For example, I found the standard Dragon much less effective against better players because of the thousands of complications that arrive with the Yugoslav. Therefore, I switched to playing the Hungarian Dragon—a sideline that has yielded me amazing results.

You will also need a much higher level of preparation and memorization at this stage of your chess career. I can't tell you the best way you should specifically memorize your openings after thoroughly learning them, but I recommend practicing them as much as you can online on blitz and rapid games. If you encounter a new sideline, take note of it and learn it so an OTB opponent doesn't surprise you, either.

Here are two lines that I have found effective in my current journey as an advanced player.

If you're interested in learning the Hungarian, I've already made a blog post and study that cover the opening comprehensively. Please do check them out if you wish!

---

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this post helpful!