The reading room
The club blog.
Editorials and deep dives, each one grounded in the same statistics that power the site.
How to Build a Chess Opening Repertoire
Three openings, sized to the study hours you actually have rather than the ones you imagine having.
September 23, 2026
Chess Opening Principles: The 10 Rules That Beat Memorization
The rules that decide your first ten moves, each one shown on a board, plus an honest account of where they stop working.
September 17, 2026
How to Learn Chess Openings (Without Memorizing Endless Lines)
A study loop built on ideas, your own games, and about twenty minutes of review a week.
September 15, 2026
How Many Chess Openings Are There?
500 ECO codes, 1,327 named variations in the standard reference, 3,810 entries in our own database, and roughly 10 to the 44 legal positions. Which number you want depends on what you are counting.
September 10, 2026
The Most Popular Chess Openings (From Millions of Real Games)
What amateurs actually play, band by band, and the gap between the openings that are popular and the openings that score.
September 7, 2026
The Best First Move in Chess, According to the Numbers
All twenty legal first moves, ranked by what they actually score at four rating bands.
September 3, 2026
1.e4 vs 1.d4: Which Should You Play? (Win Rates by Rating)
The e4 vs d4 argument, settled with 49.8 million Lichess games instead of opinions.
August 31, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for 1400 Elo (What the Data Says)
At 1400 the tricks stop paying and the structures start. Ranked by Wilson lower bound across 10.7 million games, with the band-over-band trend for each line.
August 28, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for 800 Elo (What the Data Says)
Ranked by Wilson lower bound across 4.2 million Lichess games from the under-1000 rating band, plus the reason your opening is not what is losing you games.
August 27, 2026
The Best Aggressive Chess Openings (That Actually Win Games)
Aggression is easy to find and hard to score. We filtered every attacking opening by its real win rate and by how often its trap actually fires.
August 24, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for Black Against 1.d4
Six defenses on real win rates, and the uncomfortable finding that the solid ones score worst.
August 22, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for Black Against 1.e4
Five defenses, four rating bands, and one very popular move that finishes last.
August 20, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for Black, Ranked by Data
Every mainstream Black defense scored across four rating bands, including the one where Black outright wins more games than White.
August 17, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for White, Ranked by Data
Every mainstream White opening scored across four rating bands, plus what to actually play against the Sicilian, the French and the Caro-Kann.
August 15, 2026
Chess Openings: The Complete Guide
What an opening actually is, which ones matter, and how little of it you need to memorise.
August 12, 2026
Best Chess Openings for Beginners (Ranked by Win Rate)
Ranked on the two axes a beginner actually pays for: score in the 600 rating band, and how many named lines you would have to learn to play it properly.
August 10, 2026
The Best Chess Openings for 1000 Elo (What the Data Says)
The 1000 band is the largest sample we have, 14 million games, and it is where several openings that worked below 1000 quietly stop working.
August 10, 2026
Blunder Rate: How Often Chess Players Blunder at Every Rating
A blunder rate measured across 97,740 Lichess games, band by band, with the method and its limits written out in full.
August 10, 2026
Chess Opening Win Rates: What 50 Million Games Actually Show
Fifty million rapid and blitz games, 314 opening lines, four rating bands. What the numbers say, and the three ways they mislead people.
August 10, 2026
Chess Opening Tier List: Every Major Opening Ranked by Rating Band
S through D grades for 314 opening lines, computed separately for White and Black and separately for four rating bands, with the formula printed so you can check it.
August 10, 2026
The Best Chess Openings, Ranked by Data
We ranked 314 opening lines across 49.8 million games, separately for White and Black, inside four rating bands. The winner is not the one you were told.
August 10, 2026