How to build an opening repertoire
and remember it: four steps.

One button, New repertoire, opens Quick start. Pick a popular opening or search Lichess for any course — for big courses you choose which chapters to bring in. Or paste a public Lichess study link and ChessNotes turns every variation into a tree in under ten seconds. Or import a PGN file exported from another tool. Or start from a blank board and play your first move.

Your repertoire is a tree of moves. Click a move and the sidebar shows it with its note, and a single main button for what comes next: play your first move, or train it (Play full lines or Review positions, with a badge counting what is due). Open board puts you on that exact position. The layout updates automatically when you add a branch — no overlapping nodes, no tangled arrows.

Tip: if you don't know where to start, start from your games: "From my games" reads your Chess.com and Lichess games and turns the openings you already play into repertoires. Or Quick start lists popular openings (Italian, Caro-Kann, French, London…), each tagged with the colour you play. A short guided tour with a getting-started checklist shows you the rest.

Press Review positions in the sidebar — a badge shows how many reviews are due. The FSRS-5 algorithm computes which positions are due for today's review and puts them first, then adds up to 10 new positions a day. Every position is shown to you as a clean board with your note on it: you make the move, ChessNotes checks and gives you immediate feedback in green or red.

If you miss, Stockfish answers your move on the board, then the board rewinds to the move from your repertoire and you play it yourself; the position's difficulty is recalculated (you'll see it again sooner). If you nail it with confidence, the position drifts into the future — days, weeks, months. Finished the day's new positions? "Learn 10 more" is there if you want it.

The session ends when you've cleared today's positions, or when you want. Your progress (XP, streak, daily goal, mastery) updates on your Profile. Ten, fifteen minutes a day is enough to keep a repertoire of hundreds of moves alive in memory.

Connect your Chess.com or Lichess username from "Your games" in the ChessNotes menu: only public games are read, no password needed. ChessNotes downloads them in the background and keeps them in sync.

Open a repertoire and check it against your games from the sidebar: you see where your games leave the tree, which opponent moves you have not prepared yet, and which of your habitual moves Stockfish says cost you. "Mistakes in your openings", in the account menu, goes through the opening moves of your recent games and groups the mistakes you repeat, with the better move for each.

One click puts the fix in your tree and at the front of your next review. The cycle closes: a real mistake from a game enters the repertoire, then the FSRS queue, and stops repeating. It's the most honest feedback loop there is: we don't tell you what to study, your own games show you.

At this point the flow runs itself. Every week: add the new variations seen in your games, drill the weak areas, correct the blunders that surface. The repertoire grows organically, calibrated on your real play — not on a GM's who doesn't look like you.

The Profile page shows your level, streak and daily goal, plus how much of each repertoire you have learned and what is due. If you see a certain opening keeps generating errors, open that branch of the canvas, study, reinforce. If a variation has had high stability for two months, FSRS shows it once a quarter — you don't waste time.

The goal after a few months: you enter the game with a clarity you didn't have before, and at move 8 you still know what you're doing. Not because you studied more, but because you studied better.