Draughts
Openings
The named ways a game begins, on a board you can step through — then hand the position to the solver and see what it makes of it.
Old Faithful
English draughts / American checkers
The position before the line begins.
The most played first move in the game, and the one most books recommend a beginner start with. It steps towards the middle of the board and takes a share of the centre before White has said anything at all.
It is hard to punish, and the games it leads to tend to be decided by ordinary good play in the middle game rather than by an opening trap. That is exactly why it is worth learning first.
Called Old Faithful for its reliability; it is the standard recommendation for a first move.
Analyse this positionOpenings are named in some codes and not in others, and a name is history rather than a rule. Every line here has been replayed through the rules of its own code; the names come from the published literature, and where the tradition is unclear we say so rather than guess.