How to Build a Chess Opening Repertoire: Free, Cheap, and Paid Paths

Build the repertoire in a free Lichess study first, buy one repertoire book only after a few months of playing the opening tell you it is a keeper, and pay for a Chessable course only when you have a settled repertoire you want to drill rather than a hobby you want to browse. That sequence costs nothing for the first stage, twenty to thirty dollars for the second, and whatever a course costs for the third, and each stage is only worth entering if the previous one is done. An Everyman Opening Repertoire volume is the cheap step for most club players, and a scorebook of your own tournament games is the thing that keeps the whole project honest, because the repertoire should grow from where your real games left theory, not from a list of lines you found impressive. Below: what a repertoire means at each rating, the three budget paths in detail, the feedback loop, and the mistakes that waste the most money.

What a repertoire is at your level

Before spending anything, be clear about what you are building. A repertoire is a small set of prepared answers: one reply to 1.e4, one to 1.d4, one to the sidelines, and one system as White. It is not a collection of openings and it is not knowledge of theory to move twenty. The depth that pays off is a function of rating, and buying beyond it is the most common waste in club chess.

• Under 1200. One system with White and one reply to each of 1.e4 and 1.d4, known to about move five with the ideas behind the moves. Games at this level are decided by tactics, and a repertoire's value is simply that you reach a middlegame you recognize without burning ten minutes on the clock.
• 1200 to 1600. Main lines to move eight or ten, the two or three typical plans for each side, and a fix for the specific lines that have beaten you. This is the band where a study and one book do the whole job.
• 1600 to 2000. The same structure, deeper, with model games attached to each line and the sidelines your opponents actually play at this level, which are not the ones in the books. Retention becomes the problem, which is where paid tools start to earn their price.
• 2000 and up. Beyond the scope of this guide, and largely beyond the scope of books; at that level a repertoire is a personal database maintained with an engine and updated after every event.

One thing is true at every band and should be said plainly: openings decide fewer club games than players believe. The repertoire buys you time on the clock and familiar positions, and both of those matter. It does not buy wins, and nobody can tell you how many rating points it is worth, because that depends on everything else you do.

Free: a Lichess study and the opening explorer

Everything a club player needs to build a repertoire exists on Lichess at no cost, and the free path is not a compromise version of the paid one. It is the same work done by hand.

Make the skeleton. Create a private study, one for White and one for Black, and give each a chapter per major branch: for a Black repertoire that might be "1.e4 main line," "1.e4 sidelines," "1.d4 main line," "1.d4 sidelines," and "everything else." Studies allow a generous number of chapters, so you will not run out. Each chapter starts as a bare main line of eight to ten moves with a one-sentence note at the end saying what the plan is. That is the whole repertoire on day one, and it is enough to play from.

Use the explorer to fill it. The opening explorer on the analysis board shows what strong players play from any position (the masters database) and, more usefully, what players near your own rating play, filtered by rating band and time control. The second view is the one that matters. A 1400 does not face the 2600's replies; they face 3...Bc5 and an early Qh5, and the explorer filtered to your band shows you exactly which sidelines to prepare and which to ignore. Add a branch for every reply that appears in more than a few percent of games at your level, and stop there.

Check with the engine, sparingly. The browser engine is for confirming that a line you like does not lose a pawn by force, not for finding the best move. A repertoire built from engine first choices is unplayable by a human who does not understand why the moves are good.

Import your own games. After every session, online or over the board, paste the games into the relevant chapter and find the first move where you or your opponent left the study. That move is your homework; everything else in the game is not an opening problem.

For drilling, Lichess has no built-in spaced-repetition trainer for studies, but the study itself can be replayed with the moves hidden, and free third-party trainers that read Lichess studies have existed for years; check what is currently maintained before relying on one. At this stage, replaying the chapters once a week is enough.

Cheap: one repertoire book

A book enters the picture when the study has been played from for two or three months and has reached the limits of what you can work out with the explorer: you know the moves, but not the reasons, and you keep reaching a middlegame without a plan. That is the job a good repertoire book does, and it does it for the price of one tournament entry fee.

The Everyman Opening Repertoire series is the right format for a club player because each volume covers one opening from one side with complete annotated games rather than a tree of variations. You read the games, understand the structures, and then transcribe the main lines into the study you already have, which takes an evening and is itself the best way to learn them. Buy the volume for the opening you have already been playing, not the one that promises the most; a repertoire book for an opening you have not tried is how unread shelves get built.

Two practical notes. Most repertoire books, including the Everyman series, are also sold as interactive ebooks through readers such as Forward Chess, which let you play through the lines on a screen and are easier to work from than paper if you do your transcription at a computer. And check the publication date: opening books age, and a volume more than eight or ten years old should have its main lines confirmed in the explorer before you trust them.

Paid: Chessable and courses

The paid tier solves one problem, retention, and it solves it well. Chessable's MoveTrainer runs a spaced-repetition schedule across the lines in a course, prompting you to reproduce moves at increasing intervals until they are automatic. For a player at 1600 and up with a settled repertoire, that is a real service, and the cost of a single course, which runs from around twenty dollars to well over a hundred depending on author and size, is reasonable against the hours it saves.

It is a poor first step, for three reasons. First, a course's repertoire is the author's, and until you have played an opening for a while you do not know whether it is one you want to memorize. Second, spaced repetition only works if you show up for the reviews; a course bought and abandoned after two weeks is an expensive PGN file. Third, the platform's subscription tier, which at the time of writing is priced at roughly twelve dollars a month or seventy-five a year and mainly buys a discount on courses and some extra features, makes sense only for someone buying several courses a year.

Two things worth knowing before paying. Chessable publishes free "Short and Sweet" versions of many courses, which cover the main lines of a full course in condensed form and are an honest way to try both the repertoire and the training method for nothing. And video-based platforms such as Chess.com's lessons, ChessMood, and TCW Academy sell opening material on a subscription rather than per course; they suit a player who wants explanation more than drilling, and the subscription math only works if you will use them most weeks.

The feedback loop: the scorebook

Whatever path you take, the repertoire only improves if it is fed by your own games, and for over-the-board play that means a scorebook rather than loose scoresheets. US Chess requires both players to keep score in regular-rated games anyway; the only question is whether the record survives the drive home. A hardcover scorebook keeps a season of games in one place, and something like the WE Games Ultimate Chessplayer's Scorebook gives you room for the game, the result, and a note about where you left preparation.

The routine after each event takes an hour. Enter each game into the study chapter it belongs to. Mark the first move that was not in the chapter and decide whether it needs to be: if the opponent's move appears in the explorer at your rating band more than a few percent of the time, add a reply; if it was a one-off, note it and move on. Then, with the engine still off, write one sentence about what you did not understand in the middlegame that followed. That sentence, more than any line, is what tells you when it is time for the book, and later when it is time for the course.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Too many openings. Two replies to 1.e4 is one too many at 1400. Pick one and play it for a season.
• Depth before breadth. Knowing a main line to move eighteen while having no answer to a common move-four sideline is the usual shape of a club player's preparation, and it is backwards.
• Switching after a loss. One bad game in an opening is not evidence about the opening. Ten games are.
• Engine lines without plans. If you cannot say in a sentence what White is trying to do after move ten, the line is not yours yet, however good the evaluation.
• Buying the course first. The order is study, then book, then course. Reversing it produces a large library and a small repertoire.

A six-week version

Week one: go through your scorebook or online history and list which openings you have actually been playing. Week two: build the study skeletons, five chapters per color, main lines only. Weeks three and four: fill the sidelines from the explorer at your rating band, add one plan sentence per chapter. Week five: play ten rapid games, enter them, mark where you left the study. Week six: decide whether the opening is a keeper. If it is, buy the book. If not, you have lost nothing but six weeks of useful practice.