I recently downloaded Lichess’ database of all December ‘21 games. After using it to generate puzzles for my chess training site, I realized I could also use it to find out something I’ve been wondering a long time: how useless, exactly, is it for me to memorize chess openings? I’m ~1700 on Lichess, so I chose the ELO range of games for these statistics as 1600-1900. The generated database has 10 million games, and 26 million opening lines, at a max depth of 12 half-moves. Along with ...
