How to Create Your Own Opening Course on ChessAtlas

Note: ChessAtlas is our product. This tutorial walks through building a personal opening course directly in the ChessAtlas platform.

Newly-studied openings fade fast. As Hermann Ebbinghaus first measured in 1885 in his work on the forgetting curve, unrehearsed material decays sharply within days unless it is reviewed. A structured course with spaced-repetition drills counters that decay. This guide walks through building your own opening course on ChessAtlas from scratch in 30-60 minutes: import your lines, organize into chapters, drill with FSRS, and refine based on your real games.

If you do not yet have a repertoire, read our beginner's repertoire guide and the repertoire framework pillar before creating a course.

What You'll Need

A free ChessAtlas account
Basic familiarity with one opening you want to teach (e.g., Italian Game, Caro-Kann, Queen's Gambit)
Optional: a PGN file with your chosen lines, or a connected play account for auto-import
30-60 minutes for initial setup

Step 1: Build the Repertoire First

Before creating the course shell, build the underlying repertoire. In ChessAtlas, open the Repertoire section and add the lines three ways:

Manual board entry: play moves on the interactive board, starting from 1.e4 or 1.d4 depending on your side
PGN import: drag a .pgn file into the import area; ChessAtlas parses lines and annotations automatically
Account sync: connect a supported play account; ChessAtlas pulls recent games and extracts opening lines you have actually played

Organize the repertoire by color (White / Black vs 1.e4 / Black vs 1.d4) before building chapter structure. For depth targets, see how deep to study by rating.

Step 2: Create the Course Shell

In the Course Library section, click "Create Course". Give it a clear name that includes:

The opening (e.g., "Italian Game", "Caro-Kann Defense")
The color ("for White" / "for Black")
The level ("Club", "Intermediate", "Advanced")

Example: "Caro-Kann Defense: Complete Repertoire for Club Players". Good naming helps when you create multiple courses or share with others. A consistent naming scheme also makes courses easier to find later once your library grows past a handful of openings.

Step 3: Plan Your Chapters

Chapter structure should mirror how a student learns, not how theory textbooks organize material. Four proven approaches:

By opponent response: "White plays 3.e5 (Advance)", "White plays 3.Nc3 (Classical)", "White plays 3.exd5 (Exchange)"
By theme: "Core Pawn Structure", "Piece Placement", "Typical Tactics", "Endgame Conversion"
By move depth: "Moves 1-5 (Principles)", "Moves 6-10 (Critical Decisions)", "Moves 11-15 (Middlegame Plans)"
By priority: "Essential Main Lines", "Common Sidelines", "Anti-System Weapons", "Advanced Deviations"

For most players, "by opponent response" is the most intuitive. Match the order to what you face most often at your rating.

Step 4: Add Lines to Chapters

Assign repertoire lines to chapters via drag-and-drop or checkbox selection. Each line keeps its interactive board, move history, and annotations from the repertoire level.

Keep depth consistent within a chapter: if "Chapter 1: Main Lines" goes 12 moves deep, the other chapters should match that depth for core lines, then shallower for sidelines. Inconsistent depth is the most common reason a course feels lopsided when you later drill it.

Step 5: Annotate Critical Positions

Moves alone are skeleton. Add a one-to-three-sentence note at every major branching point:

The plan: "White aims for Ne5 and Bxh7+ attack"
The opponent's idea: "Black plans ...c5 and ...Qb6 targeting b2 and d4"
The tactical motif: "If Black plays ...Nxe4, respond with Re1 and Rxe4 regaining material with a better structure"
The mistake to avoid: "Do not play h3 too early; it weakens g3 and concedes ...Bg4 without compensation"

Short annotations beat long ones. If you write paragraphs, students skip them. See how to memorize chess openings and actually remember them for why plans-with-moves beats moves-alone.

Step 6: Enable FSRS Training

ChessAtlas drills with FSRS, the open-source Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, a modern algorithm in the broader family of spaced-repetition systems (see why FSRS beats SM-2). In the course settings:

Enable spaced repetition
Set a target retention level. FSRS lets you choose the desired-retention probability of recalling a card when it comes due; the FSRS reference implementation uses 0.9 (90%) as its default, which is a practical starting point, raised toward 95% for tournament-critical lines and lowered for rare sidelines to keep the review load manageable.
Decide whether to drill from both sides or only your side (usually only your side at first)
Turn on instant feedback on wrong moves

Start drilling 10-15 minutes daily. The scheduler then spaces each position automatically, which is the core mechanism described in the spaced-repetition literature: positions you miss resurface the next day, positions you master stretch out to weeks or months.

Step 7: Test Like a Student

Wait a day or two after building, then drill your own course as if you did not create it. You will find:

Moves that feel "obvious" when creating but need an annotation
Chapter transitions that lack context
Missing sidelines that your repertoire covers but the course chapter doesn't
Over-detailed annotations you can cut for clarity

Fix these before the course goes into regular rotation. Better yet, ask a friend at the target rating to drill it and report confusion points. Waiting before you self-test matters because, per Ebbinghaus's 1885 forgetting-curve research, a delay is exactly what exposes the lines you have not truly retained.

Step 8: Update From Real Games (Ongoing)

Import your rated games on a regular cadence, for example weekly or after each event. The Deviation Finder flags the exact move where your games left the course. Add those deviations to the relevant chapters. See the deviation detection workflow.

Set a monthly cadence: 1 hour to review the last 20 games, add new branches, and prune unused ones. The course becomes a living document.

Common Mistakes

Importing every sub-variation from PGN

PGN files often contain alternative lines in parentheses. Importing everything floods the course with branches you never intended to teach. Import selectively, or prune immediately after import.

Organizing chapters after adding lines

Creating chapters after all lines are in produces a mess of drag-and-drop reshuffling. Create the empty chapter structure first, then add lines to each chapter as you build the repertoire.

Writing too much annotation

Three-paragraph explanations get skipped. One-sentence plans get read. Keep it tight.

Not testing from the student's perspective

You know the material; your students do not. Drill your own course fresh after a day. Ask a peer to drill it. Blind spots are where courses fail.

Conclusion: What You End Up With

After these eight steps you have a self-contained opening course: a color-organized repertoire, chapters that follow how a student actually meets the opening, short annotations at every branch, and an FSRS schedule that keeps it all in memory. Because Step 8 feeds real-game deviations back in, the course keeps improving on its own instead of going stale. The payoff is concrete: you stop re-learning the same lines and start reinforcing them, which is the entire point of building a course rather than reading theory once.

Your Micro-Action Today

Set a 30-minute timer. Add 5 core lines of your main opening to your ChessAtlas repertoire. Create one chapter. Write a one-sentence plan note at each branching point. Drill for 10 minutes. You now have a working course.

Create a free ChessAtlas account to start.

Sources and Further Reading

The forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus, 1885) on Wikipedia documents how unrehearsed memory decays over days, the problem a course solves.
Spaced repetition on Wikipedia explains the review-scheduling method that counters that decay.
The Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS) reference implementation documents the algorithm and its default 90% desired-retention setting used for the drilling schedule.