Back to Chess.com Content!
Dear all,
I can't begin to express how happy I am to be writing this post and re-joining the Chess.com content community!
I remember way back in the early days, I started recording video lessons for Chess.com in 2009. I enjoyed great relationships with the core team. David Pruess had been a big part of my life and an early mentor for me ever since I met him when I was 11, and I got along really well with Erik and the rest of the gang. My videos encompassed a wide range of topics, came out about once a week, and were generally well received by the tight-knit community.
Over time, things changed a lot. Chess.com expanded far beyond having daily chess, instructional videos, and instructional articles as their main M.O. They grew into an incredibly large chess superpower, complete with the best live chess server in the world, a super popular puzzle rush and puzzle battle feature, top events with 2700+ GMs that I have always enjoyed playing in, relationships with top streamers who grow the game to the more casual audience, the premier chess news and journalism service in the world, and so much more.
I was always glad to see the site, and the game, grow so much. But what I have always done best is chess improvement. I have worked very hard for many years to become one of the top players in the world, and the only content I am interested in making is training resources to help my fellow players reach their goals.
As Chess.com expanded in so many different directions, my relationship with the site became more sporadic over the years, and I pivoted to Chessable, which was solely focused on e-books (often referred to as “courses” on the site) geared at chess improvement. I published 8 such courses on Chessable, with a ninth to be released in late January. I never mentioned any of this on Chess.com before, as Chessable (and PMG on the whole) was their main competitor.
Now with the merger complete, I'm delighted that I can reach out to the chess.com audience and talk a bit about what I have been up to in our time apart!
In the last two and a half years, I have published an entire catalog of opening e-books/video courses on Chessable, available here:
https://www.chessable.com/courses/s/Shankland
For anyone who missed my instructive videos in recent years, especially opening videos, this is the place for you!
My goal for every course I wrote was inherently selfish; I wanted to do some deep analysis and find good ideas in the opening. Writing and publishing a repertoire would force me to do an exhaustive coverage of tons of mainline openings, to organize all the files, to explain the key ideas to the best of my ability, and the hope would be that it would make me a better player. Writing online content that would hopefully sell well was just icing on the cake.
Throughout the last two years, I have been able to play my own published repertoires on countless occasions against some of the best players in the world, with fantastic results. Every single one of the following games came straight out of the work I did on Chessable.
When considering how well the analysis I did held up against my 2700+ peers, it was unsurprising that it proved incredibly helpful for up and coming players who studied it well and put it to good use. The most notable example is that of Abhimanyu Mishra, who played my repertoire while making the jump from 2300 to the youngest grandmaster of all time. He had been an exclusive 1.e4 player to a point, and played 1.d4 for the first time on February 13, 2021. He was rated 2354 at the time.
He played 1.d4 in every single subsequent White game until he made his GM title, following my proposed recommendations the entire time. He rose incredibly fast, and these were his White results in that time:
In addition to the results being fantastic, outperforming his rating by 172 points, he also managed to drop some devastating novelties. My favorite was this encounter with Vladimir Belous:
Over the next few weeks, I will post a series or articles introducing each of the courses I have done and how they have fared in the time since they have been released. Both in my own tournament practice as well as the tournament practice of some of the course’s followers. I have been wanting to write this article for a very long time, hoping to give back to the Chess.com community, and I am so glad that with the acquisition complete, I am finally able to do so!
