Building an opening repertoire using Anki

Just as a heads up, I've personally had really bad results with spaced repetition of chess openings.

I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition in other fields of study, so I've tried to figure out why that is. I think I've come up with a plausible explanation.

The problem is that as chess players, we rely heavily on context-dependent memory. Every chess player classifies moves in the opening, or in chess in general, as beloning to one of three types:

  1. obvious, with no other alternatives
  2. obvious, with other obvious alternatives
  3. not obvious.

Sometimes, a position may be evaluated as Type 1, until you come across a move or idea that qualifies as Type 3. If you find out that it's a good idea, the position (and other positions like it) may change classification from Type 1 to Type 2. This is why it's good to study master games, for instance: the more Type 3 positions you encounter, the more likely it is that a position that you've never seen before will be Type 1 or 2, rather than 3.

How moves are classified with respect to these groupings depends on the chess player's qualification, but generally, when you study an opening line, you approach these groups differently. You won't need to memorize Type 1 positions (there's only one move), and you'll easily memorize Type 3 positions (they're brand new information, and they're interesting).

The problem is Type 2 positions, and that's why beginners have trouble memorizing openings: to them, everything is Type 2. These positions are hard to memorize because the context is too vague to help us retrieve the memory: my favorite example is in the 6.h3 variation in the KID, White plays Qc2, Be2, Nfd2 and g4 in some order. This order is usually important, and generally different in different sub-variations, and sometimes the reason is deeply obscured.

So, here's my problem with spaced repetition when applied to openings: it teaches you to ignore this classification. Everything must be Type 1.

The reason this happens is that even with a small side line ending at move 12-15, you're looking at 100-200 facts. Faced with a workload of two hours a day, you start answering them as quickly as possible. You even manage to memorize the variation.

And then your OTB play suffers horribly, because you've been training yourself to miss crucial moments in the game.

/r/chess Thread