We built the opening tool we wanted
Why another chess tool?
New chess apps show up every week, each promising AI coaching, instant repertoires and a dashboard for everything. Most of them are wide and shallow: lots of buttons, and little you come back to after the first week.
We went the other way. We play chess ourselves, and we started with the problems we actually had: keeping our repertoires in one place, remembering them when it counts, and then practising them. openingrep.fit is small on purpose. Everything in it, we use for our own games. Anything new has to earn its place the same way.
Who we are
We're a small group of software developers who also play chess, with one of us playing at FM strength (rated over 2300, but never willing to pay FIDE for the title) to keep the rest of us honest. We're lucky enough to share a repertoire: the Najdorf and the Ragozin with Black, and anti-Sicilians and the Italian with White. So every line on this site is one we study, forget and fight over ourselves.
What we needed, and what we built
We kept forgetting our lines. So the site trains your repertoire with you. It shows a position from your lines, and you play your move. The lines you miss come back the next day, and the ones you know come back less and less often.
Knowing a line isn't the same as playing it. So you can play practice games from your openings and the middlegames they lead to, against Stockfish limited to the level you choose. It works today, and we're still polishing it.
Our repertoires lived in five places. So there's one library for them. Import a PGN, edit it like a study, and export it again whenever you like. You can also bring in your own games from Lichess and Chess.com and see where they left your preparation.
We wanted to check our lines without leaving the board. So there's an opening explorer, with an engine that runs in your browser.
What it costs, and where your data lives
It's free. You need an account so your repertoires and games are saved. If we add a paid tier later, it will be for things that cost us real money to run, and we'll say so first.
Your repertoires are yours. They export as plain PGN, which every chess program reads, so nothing is locked in.
What's next
We'll keep the same bar: build it, use it on our own games, and only release it once it earns its place. Next is a polish of the Chapter Trainer. Where the daily training asks you scattered positions, the Chapter Trainer takes one chapter from start to finish: you watch its lines, play them back from memory, then go over the ones you missed. During the World Championship match (from 24 November), we'll follow the openings game by game.
We'll also write about openings here. First up: the Accelerated Ragozin.
Try it
Make a free account, import a PGN, and play your first practice game from it.
Something missing, or something that doesn't work the way you'd expect? Tell us at openingrep.fit/requests or at reviews@openingrep.fit.