I started playing chess (again) in August 2025 when one of my sons challenged me to a game on chess.com. I had played a bit as a child and the occasional casual game as an adult. But I was certainly restarting as a beginner. After a couple of months of playing on chess.com, I bought my first two opening courses: Counterblow: A Complete Fighting Repertoire for Beginners and First Strike: The Fighting Stonewall Attack for Beginners. I used the openings from those two courses almost exclusively. They are good courses, the openings are good, and the author, Robert Ramirez, has a great YouTube Channel. But for reasons I’ll likely explain in a future post, I’ve decided to switch openings as part of my Simplified Chess Improvement System reset.

Against 1. e4, I will play the French Defense. I am using NM Bryan Tillis’s Short & Sweet: Tillis’s French Defense to get started. The course has 17 lines, but I’ve configured the course to only show me the 6 Priority lines. I’ll get to the remaining 11 lines after I’ve played a few games with the French.

As White, I am switching from 1. d4 (and the Stonewall Attack) to 1. e4 and I am using GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko’s Opening Compass for Black and White course. The course also includes a complete Black repertoire and I will use that too, though instead of playing the Petroff against 1. e4, e5; 2. Nf3, as Oleksiyenko’s course recommends, I’ll be playing the French. The full course has 231 trainable variations. But I’ve set it to only learn the Priority lines, which reduces to 81 trainable variations. 11 of those are for the Petroff, so removing those gives me 70 lines to learn.

6 lines from Tillis’s course and 70 lines from Oleksiyenko’s course gives me a manageable 76 lines to start with. And I definitely won’t be tackling the 76 lines from Oleksiyenko’s course all at once. I’ve memorized the 6 Priority lines for playing the Italian from that course. All other lines I will learn when I play a game and the game leads to those lines. I’m not going to spend time learning lines I don’t play against.

So, to start, I’ve memorized the 6 Priority lines for the Italian and I’ll memorize the 6 Priority lines for the French. For everything else I’ll play using my best understanding of Opening Principles and refer to my courses to see where I deviated, if appropriate.

Why the simplistic approach to learning my openings? I’ve found that I do not lose games because I lack opening theory knowlege. I lose because I blunder, or do not understand the position well (and then make mistakes), or lose in the endgame. I’d much rather spend my time following GM Noël Studer’s rule of thirds: 1/3 of chess training time playing and analyzing games, 1/3 doing tactics, and 1/3 split between openings, strategy, and endgames. Only 1/9 of my time will be used to actively study openings.

The French and Italian. Two great openings. Two great countries. A lot of great wine!