[Suggestion] Play Against Openings

So something I've had an idea for. Maybe you've noticed that you have trouble against certain openings. Maybe you ran into the King's Indian Attack, or the Scandinavian and you've been crushed solidly each time and need practice learning what the themes and plans are, and how to defend or disrupt them.

You could play against a friend over and over, but that's limited to their level of interest.

Let's face it, you never really know what the computer is going to play unless you start from a very specific position on the board editor. But even then, the computer might go "no this is stupid, I'm going to play obscure/complicated computer lines instead of what you've set me up to do." So why not add in the ability to tell the computer to play a certain opening?

You can already do this. What you would do is open up an analysis board, put in the moves for the opening you want to practice, and then choose “continue from here.” On the website, you do that with the little hamburger menu, and it will give you the option to play against the computer or against a friend. It works similarly on the Android app. Hope that helps!

ETA: Rereading your post, I see you mentioned setting up from the board editor and are concerned the computer won't play normal opening lines from there and will instead play computer lines. But that's what computers do. Stockfish is going to play like Stockfish. Another alternative for you might be just using the opening databases with an analysis board. That will give you a sense of what good human players do in various openings.

I've also found it fun to create thematic tournaments, although sometimes it can be tricky to find the critical mass to get one started!

@shymax, Would that allow for replaying the opening with a single click? As in "over and over"... that would be very helpful - so much so that I would actually use it a lot, unlike resetting the board, or going through a long sequence of clicks, before every game.

@bz Good idea. That is easy to do on the web version. When you go to the analysis board, there are two little boxes below, one that says “FEN” and another that says “PGN.” (You probably already know this, but FEN is a kind of notation that saves a position in chess, and PGN is a kind of notation used to save a complete game or games.) Either will work here, but if all you’re interested in is the starting position and not a particular move order, I would suggest using the FEN. So the first time, you will make your moves until you get the desired starting position. Then just copy the FEN and save it in a text file where you can easily retrieve it whenever you want to create a game from that starting position. When you open up a new analysis board, you can just copy and paste that FEN into the appropriate box, hit enter, and you are all set.

This does not work on mobile, but both on mobile and on the website, the board editor is another way to do this. While it’s a little less fine-grained (you can give whatever position from FEN), you can give it a robust number of positions from various openings just using the “position” drop-down menu, then using the “continue from here” option as you would from the analysis board.

Know what? I've just found that, once a game created from the Analysis Board is finished, you get a Rematch button, pressing which the board flips and the new game starts from the position you've used last time! So, really, what I wrote above is meaningless.

I will now use it for practice, and I recommend you readers do the same - just build yourself a small repertoire of openings to begin with, which would take care of a few points in your ratings. The rest would try to follow.

And - off topic but maybe someone could give a quick answer - what is the difference between the Analysis board and the Editor? I mean, why is it not a single feature? I find that games started from the Editor do not offer the Rematch button, for one example of a seemingly needless difference between the two.