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Chess experts often tell beginners that they should not spend too much time worrying about their opening repertoire. They advise them to work on their middlegames and their endgames because they claim that they are more important. At the same time, though, top chess players often spend most of their time working on their opening. They often work hard to find a variation that their opponent is unlikely to be familiar with or may even look for a novelty, a move that few players know about.

Though it is true that everyone needs to work on tactics, positional concepts such as controlling space and preventing threats, middlegames and endgames (many players play a great middlegame only to see their game fall apart in the endgame), if you lose in the opening, extensive knowledge about the rest of the game is insufficient. Solid knowledge of the openings in chess is a vital part of success.

For me, improving at chess requires great patience. I sometimes feel that I've made progress but later play a game where I don't make use of my newly-acquired knowledge. Or sometimes I feel that I've learned certain strategies and tricks which I'm never able to use in an actual game. That may be because my opponent also knows them or because many situations that we read about in books rarely seem to come up in match play. Even so, knowing about these strategies and tricks keeps me alert and prepares me for a similar situation which may occur in a game.

The key to mastering the game of chess is to become familiar with as many different types of positions as possible. Once you've done this, your pattern recognition will improve to the point that you'll instinctively feel what to do once you achieve similar patterns on the chessboard. One excellent way to develop recognition for different patterns is to analyze the games of great players. For example, the Cuban grandmaster Capablanca wasn't known for complex openings, but they were very effective.

It's important to choose an opening that you're comfortable with and reflects your style. If you're an aggressive player, you'll probably prefer the King Pawn Opening e4 over the Queen Pawn Opening d4.

Grandmasters are so familiar with different kinds of chess openings that they can often look at the middlegame of a chess game and say what opening was used. The reason is that they know what kinds of middlegames develop from different openings.

Grandmasters and their trainers study the games of their opponents very carefully and then prepare openings

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