Anatoly Karpov, in his book about the legendary Jose Raul Capablanca, stated that a chess player must study the Endgame first.  This is true, like I said - most games are decided in the endgame.  It gives me sleepless nights whenever I lose a supposedly practically won game.  True as it is, once you have established a firm grasped of Endgame techniques, either by studying or by solving puzzles, there remains another important thing every novice players must put their attention to: Building Your Own Opening Book or Repertoire.

I have played countless games, some recorded, but most of them not.  Either way, they are no longer important, because I just came up with the idea of building my own Opening Book, just very recently.  The activity is recent, but the idea took many years to provide concrete ways on improving one's Opening Play.  So for those novices around like I am, here's what I can share, in case you haven't figured how to build your own book yet.

One way to get stronger in chess, is by imitation.  You imitate a strong player, most likely a legendary player or World Champion.  No, I'm not talking about general imitation, I'm talking about imitating their play.

This calls for resourcefulness, to be able to achieve our goal, the first thing we must acquire is a collection of our favorite player's games - called database.  A World Champion's summary of games normally contains hundreds or thousand or sometimes even more thousands of games - and so much, the better.

Next we divide his games, create a new database of him/her playing the White pieces and the other database of him/her playing the Black pieces.  Strong players do this before joining a tournament or matches, to make preparations against specific opponents.

Before I proceed, I would like to mention again: we cannot allow ourselves to follow opening variations blindly.  We must understand the merits of every and every moves.  It will take knowledge and experience to be able to do this.  Don't worry.  Kasparov once said that "you will lose hundreds of games before you become a strong player."

For example, in this Opening below: