A new Coach!

Please meet Phil Hopkins, a high level player who has never been bothered to go through the grind to get a Title but he certainly merits one. He regularly plays against GM's, and wins. He just needs to start the tournament grind if he ever decides to go for a Chess Title. It might be a money situation for him. Who knows? But he has played up to the 2500 level in Blitz and I've watched a few of his games. There is some impressive stuff there.

Phil was recommended to me by an admin at Team Canada, so he's earned and is getting a lot of respect, even from overseas.

He's got some god awful openings to contend with and he doesn't need to think about where his opening pieces belong. They just seem to get there.

In his teaching he stresses a future vision of piece movements and  quickly calculating candidate pieces, but also to evaluate the opponent candidate pieces, which has never really been a strong skill for me. So I'm sure I'll be learning a lot here.

One problem for us that came up in the first few minutes of our first class was language use and contracting piece move descriptions to the minimum is a good example. For me, some of the terms Phil used I would only use in Algebra but we've made a couple of accommodations for that.

He likes the Woodpecker Method as tool to teach that candidate piece selection, and evaluating the opponent pieces. I'm not sure I like the method. It heavily stresses memory development of board situations and memory development isn't a problem for me. I need to learn the best and  most likely moves before I start the memory work.

Anyway, here is a Blitz game against one of his students, that Phil played and won. He played that weird Polish opening, used to leave a candidate wondering what he's up to.

The level on Phils' opponent wasn't so high in this game but that's 51 moves, in 5 minutes! Good God, how do they do that?

Anyway, Phil is recruiting for new students and things are filling up fast. You can also contact him  on Whatsapp, username: ThemanfromEngland.  +447912434358

If you decide to contact him, please tell him you saw this post on my blog.