Opening Priorities

Location: Tools > Opening Priorities

The Opening Priorities tool lets you import your games from Chess.com or Lichess and analyze how you manage time across different openings. It highlights which openings cause you to spend the most time in the early moves, helping you identify areas where you struggle and prioritize which lines to study more closely in your repertoire.

This feature enables you to:

+ Detect which openings consistently consume the most time early in your games
+ Understand whether your time usage patterns correlate with performance or confidence in specific openings
+ Prioritize which openings to review or reinforce in your repertoire based on time and results

Controls

The Controls section allows you to import games directly from Lichess or Chess.com. Simply click the corresponding icon to toggle the desired platform. Once selected, you can begin loading your games.

◦ You can cancel the import process at any time by clicking Cancel.
◦ While the games are loading, the cards are temporarily hidden to speed up processing.
◦ Click Show Results at any time to view live updates as games are being processed.

This section provides full control over the data import process, ensuring smooth integration whether you are analyzing a few games or your entire online archive.

Filters

The Filters section allows you to focus your analysis on specific types of games or conditions. You can narrow down your data by any of the following criteria:

◦ Player Colour: Show only games as White or Black
◦ Opening Name: Use wildcard search to find openings of interest
◦ Date Range: Select from-to dates to analyze games from a specific period
◦ Time Control: Filter by Classic, Rapid, Blitz, or Custom formats (e.g., 10+0, 45+45)
◦ Result: Restrict analysis to wins, losses, or draws
◦ Ply Range: Focus on a specific segment of moves within each game

Filters help you target specific study areas — for example, you can compare how your time usage differs in blitz versus classical games, or when playing certain openings.

Weighting

The Weighting card allows you to assign the importance of different aspects in order to fine-tune how your opponent priorities are calculated. You can adjust the sliders to determine how much influence each factor should have:

◦ Average Think Time: Measures how long you usually spend on moves in this opening
◦ Number of Games: Reflects how often you reach this opening in your games
◦ Performance Rating: Compares your results to opponent ratings, rewarding higher performance
◦ Long Think Threshold: Identifies how often you take significantly longer than average on early moves

The overall Priorities Score is dynamically calculated from your chosen weights, giving you full control over which factors matter most in evaluating your openings.

Note: This weighting configuration is directly used in the Priorities Card when you sort by Weighted.

Priorities Card

The Priorities Card displays a ranked list of your openings based on your selected weighting configuration. You can sort openings by any of the following criteria:

◦ Weighted: Uses your chosen slider parameters from the Weighting card
◦ Performance: Sorts by your calculated performance rating per opening
◦ First Long Think: Sorts by the first move where you spent more than double your average move time
◦ Number of Games: Sorts by how frequently you’ve reached each opening

You can switch between ascending and descending order for each category, and use pagination to browse through larger lists.

Each entry in the list includes:

◦ Opening Name: The recognized ECO name or your custom label
◦ PGN Line: The representative move sequence for the opening
◦ Thinking Time Chart: Displays average move time by ply, along with minimum and maximum values
◦ Number of Games: Indicates how many total games reached this opening
◦ WDL and Performance Rating: Calculated as follows — a win = opponent rating +200, draw = opponent rating, loss = opponent rating −200
◦ Avg Time (≤30 ply): Average time in seconds spent during the first 30 ply (the opening phase)
◦ First Long Think: The first move where your think time was more than double the previous average — showing when you first encountered real uncertainty

Personal Note: I often use this card to find openings where my first long think happens unusually early — that usually means I’m unclear about my move order or struggling to recall my preparation. It’s a great cue for where I should strengthen my repertoire next.

Repertoire Finder

When you click on an item in your Opening Priorities list, the Repertoire Finder card displays all matching repertoire entries from your personal database.

◦ Instantly locate where the selected opening appears within your repertoire
◦ Jump directly to the position on the board for deeper study
◦ Compare your in-game choices against your prepared lines

This seamless link between analysis and preparation helps you turn insights from time-based statistics directly into actionable repertoire study.

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