Let me introduce myself shortly. My name is David, and I am a professional chess coach and IM from the Netherlands.

This is a very difficult question, and there are several sides to it.

1: This is the most important advice you will ever hear: Chess is 99% tactics. It is all about tricks, forking and pinning your opponents. I can not count how many times I have played a wonderful opening, gotten some advantage on the long term to lose on some simple blunder. If Bill Clinton could rephrase it, he would say: It's the tactics stupid.

2: Having said that, I believe the best way to actually learn openings is by studying their specific tactics. Especially if you are just starting out, it makes a lot of sense to study miniature games (short games under 20 moves). Those are always won or lost by some specific trick (tactic is basically a synonym for trick). Repeat those games several times until you understand what is going on. Afterwards you can try to copy those tricks for yourself and voila you have an opening!

3: To get you started you can find a lot of books with the term miniatures. You could also search on youtube for traps, although my personal preference is to play through the game and not wait for it listening to 20 minutes of blabla on youtube.

So that's it for the recommendation. If you are going to study openings instead of tactics, you should study opening tactics to make the most progress.

Cheers!

This is a very difficult question, and there are several sides to it.

1: This is the most important advice you will ever hear: Chess is 99% tactics. It is all about tricks, forking and pinning your opponents. I can not count how many times I have played a wonderful opening, gotten some advantage on the long term to lose on some simple blunder. If Bill Clinton could rephrase it, he would say: It's the tactics stupid.

2: Having said that, I believe the best way to actually learn openings is by studying their specific tactics. Especially if you are just starting out, it makes a lot of sense to study miniature games (short games under 20 moves). Those are always won or lost by some specific trick (tactic is basically a synonym for trick). Repeat those games several times until you understand what is going on. Afterwards you can try to copy those tricks for yourself and voila you have an opening!

3: To get you started you can find a lot of books with the term miniatures. You could also search on youtube for traps, although my personal preference is to play through the game and not wait for it listening to 20 minutes of blabla on youtube.

So that's it for the recommendation. If you are going to study openings instead of tactics, you should study opening tactics to make the most progress.

Cheers!