Josh Waitzkin

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Not a clear question....Perhaps you meant to ask:

- Would the latest Chess Master application with all of its tutorials, videos, exercises + drills be more useful to "any chess player" compared to a full-featured Chess.com membership?

My answer would be : for players just starting out,  Chess Master is more value for money (given that it costs you 20-30$ tops) compared to a annual membership of chess.com.

Once you start forming development goals for yourself and are highly motivated to put in the work to climb,  Chess.com wins, hands down.  It's like comparing a pocket dictionary to the internet.

Yeah Chessmaster is pretty cool. You can get Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition (The newest one) for right at $20. 

Its got some cool features but the Academy is my favorite. Josh Waitzkin section in there has really basic instructions all the way up to the psychology of competition, annotated games of him playing (voice and text) and, new this edition, a few games played by Moprhy, Tal and others that Josh annotates (also voice and text). 

Another section of the Academy is called "Attacking Chess" and was done by GM Larry Christiansen. This section isn't as full as Waitzkin, but Christiansen goes over all the games in his match against the Chessmaster 9000 engine as well as 6 other games by GMs like Fischer, Lasker, Alekhine etc.

There is one other section of the academy called the Chessmaster Series that has some good training puzzles and problems. 

Outside of that though, Chessmaster is lacking. I find the Openings section to be lacking and I don't enjoy playing the various Ai's they have. It does have a neat 750,000+ games database. 

So pretty much what Shivsky said. Once you start to develop as a player, Chessmaster becomes limited. 

Josh loves to learn to push himself and to achieve as indicated in his book on learning. I suspect top level chess was just too boooooring for him and left little 'me time'. As Spassky said, "Chess at the top is an abnormal way of life."

Josh is great teacher. He brings inspiration and enthusiasm, which is what you need from a teacher, especially in chess (and especially for teaching kids, which is where it really counts). but the top GMs reached GM level by their mid-teens. By this measure Josh was always on a lower trajectory, even if he was the top US youth player at the time. This tells you about the weakness of US chess, not the strength of Josh. Another really great teacher is Silman, though he is "only" an IM. So being a great teacher doesn't imply that you can win at the highest level. But I would always give Chessmaster to a kid to learn from, rather than any other more professional chess programme, because it's fun and Josh's lessons are easy and inspiring.

i love the way Josh presented his thought process in his tutorials and made me enjoy playing chess and not merely focus on winning.  i finally came to the point when i can laugh at my loses, and learn thereafter. my last game so far in Live Chess is my current playing style.

with regards to comparison with Magnus Carlsen, I think, in my opinion, Josh could reach his peak with the present strength of either Fabiano Caruana or Anish Giri.  He'd probably win against Carlsen by 20% probability.

Although he was a strong chess player, I doubt he would have made world champion.

But I really enjoyed his lessons on Chessmaster 10th edition and as you said, I think they are really good for improving.

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 If he could have, he would have.

Josh would have probably reached at least solid GM standard (maybe elo 2550-2600). I don't think he would be a world top 100 player though.

Just my opinion!  His books and lessons are great, I have to say.

Old thread I know, but I'm midway through the Chessmaster XI Waitzkin Academy component right now and I'm getting a lot out of it. I like the more abstract stuff about attitudes to winning and losing etc, and I find his general style and approach pretty easy to follow without being too simple.

I think I'll always prefer Chessbase (I have Fritz v9, old-ish now but still excellent) for post-game analysis and playing games vs AI, but Chessmaster seems very good for general learning, and includes a large annotated (albeit it a little sparingly) database. Mind you, Fritz also has a pretty large database on the original disk, and there's a vast amount of annotated and analysed games on the net in the Fritz/Chessbase format (*.cba)

But I'd definitely recommend Chessmaster to anyone relatively new to chess like myself, who wants some decent tutoring.

... as an irrelevant postscript, I love one of the Chessmaster comments during a Tal middle game. Something like; "Chess theorists have long argued about who has the advantage in this position. The answer of course is that the better player does."  Lol.