Camp ChessFeels 3
It Doesn’t F*****g Matter What Opening You Play
(Or: How To Study Openings In The Age of Information Overload)

My name is JJ Lang, and I am an expert-rated chess player, full-time chess teacher and outspoken chess blogger. For the first two weeks of February, I'll be hosting a camp consisting of four lectures and two sets of training games focused on the age-old question of how to study openings.

We will dedicate the first two lectures to making sense of unfamiliar-to-us opening positions by building up a conceptual tool-kit and general guidelines for making sense of early-game positions. Then we will pivot to a more practical question for the second week, asking how we, as students of the game, can get the most value out of our study time. Register here.

“Openings teach you openings, endgames teach you chess” - Stephan Gerzadowicz

“I don’t know who Stephan Gerzadowicz is, but he was studying openings wrong” - JJ Lang

No topic in chess is more contentious than the value of studying the opening, particularly for amateur players. Many professional players will insist that the opening doesn’t matter until you reach some absurdly high rating, only to turn around and criticize your games for making “thematic” errors and blunders before move fifteen. But others will market books and courses loaded with hundreds, if not thousands, of specific variations that, for the most part, you will never remember, let alone encounter in your own games.

In other words: understanding the opening is a necessary part of chess mastery, but learning openings is often a futile, time-consuming obstacle to chess mastery. In this two week intensive course, we will learn how to learn and study openings in a way that will contribute to our overall understanding of chess.

This camp is for ‘intermediate’ players who have some experience trying to study openings on their own. Ideally, campers will be rated in the 1300-1700 range for USCF (or +100 range for chesscom/+300 range lichess).