What is the easiest technique for memorizing chess openings?

Studying chess openings right now and was wondering if there was any trick to memorizing lots of variations.|||The best way (for me) to memorize them is playing through them. Pick an opening, and play it through on a chessboard. Learn why each player made that particular move. That way, if you ever need to use it, you can follow the same way of thinking. A good example: the king's pawn opening. If you can answer why white makes that move, you can more easily use the rest of the opening to your advantage, rather than just memorizing it for the sake of using a well established opening.





A good site to look at openings it chess.com|||There is no best technique or trick, in the end it comes down to how good your memory is. The most important thing is to understand why you are making the moves, because that makes it easier to memorize them, and if your opponent deviates, you'd know why it is bad (chess books help a lot for this). Some players seem to be able to remember lines that they have looked at years before; I find that impossible myself, but it helps if you can remember the idea behind a certain line, so you know at least in what the thematic moves would be.





The problem is that you often have to break one rule in the opening, to achieve some other advantage. For example, in the Gr眉nfeld opening, you give up control of the center to get active pieces and use them to attack your opponents center. Sometimes you give up king's safety or you sacrifice a pawn for faster development. But make sure that you know what you gave up, and what kind of compensation you got for it.





Only after this it's useful to start memorizing concrete lines. There is opening training software, but I never tried it. What I like to do is play blitz games against a full-strength chess engine with a good opening book, and try to get a reasonable position out of the opening. If you want to practice a certain opening or line, start with a non-standard starting position. If you go wrong, study the line carefully and try to figure out as well as you can. Make sure you spend more time analyzing than just playing blitz against the computer; that is just a tool to find the holes in your repertoire.|||Every early move should be to try to take better control over the center of the board. Another strategy is to develop the knights before the bishops. Try not to move a piece more than once in the opening unless you can capture something or gain something important. Thus it is important to develop before you attack. Do not bring your queen out early. Safeguarding the king should be the top priority. Try to castle early enough in the game. Castling the kingside is done most often, as it is easier to defend. Castling the queenside leaves the king a bit more exposed.





Hope this helps your game :)|||As with anything else: index cards.|||basically you cant, you just have to go with the flow