gotham chess - New Chessly course

Hi all

Just wanted your thoughts on Levy's new online course, Chessly.  Is it really worth the money?  I am seriously wanting to improve my game.  

Or is it worth spending my money on Chess.com and doing watching there videos.  

Please share your views/experience.

regards

Amjad

You can try one chapter from free on each lesson if I am not mistaken, did you tried it ? 

The free chapter includes LOTS; I went through a portion of the Vienna Gamibt, and it looks good. I do wish it weren't so expensive, but am considering it. Wondering if his e6 b6 course is oriented more toward English Defense or Queen's Indian.

Not a user of this course but now you made me curious :-) 

Gotham chess is for me the perfect illustration that GM, IM, CM have not difference in their respective level from my point of view. I mean how would I make the difference between a CM crushing me with black and Magnus crushing me with black? Magnus would need a few move less probably. 

What I look in the course is the ability to teach, as a matter of fact the best course I have purchase so far was from an IM. 

I said Vienna Gambit (with a typo), but should have said his e4 course; the Vienna Gambit is the first lesson, which is the freebie. 

@OneEdgeU2 you are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but just making a statement like that is pretty useless. Do you have a reason for saying that, or do you just not like New Yorkers? It does not seem to be the majority opinion.

 If you are serious about improving, chessdotcom is a vastly better choice than Gotham.

No not really. 

I purchased course on another website and their structure are kind of equivalent to gotham (with drill ). 

You don't have the equivalent on chessdotcom. You have video with short exercise but nothing close to what you can find on other platform. 

Like for example the best course I have bought so far is from an IM on the subject of piece exchange. Lot of explanation, lot of exercise and you can drill. 

On another site I bought courses on opening and pawn structures. No exercise there but with more or 30 hours of video per course. 

I did not buy a course, because they are a bit expensive (for me, at least, I live in economic troubled italy), but the quality seems very good and there are free chapters, so you can try for yourself. 

You are comparing platforms. I was addressing the content creator. Gotham gives a lot of bad advice. That’s my point. Drills based on flawed ideas do not improve your game.

No you were saying that chess.com is a better choice for improving. 

I cannot judge Levy courses (but I doubt that an IM would give bad advice or you would need to be close/above his level to see the potential flaw = you would not buy the course anyway), but one thing I know that that the teaching material you can find on chess.com while excellent is structurally very different of Levy course or course on other plateform. 

Either because of drill, exercise or just the quantity of content. 

So far I have bought course on chessable, Udemy and chessbase. Those courses on each plateform are very different on the way they make you work and they are all very different of what you can find on this site. 

Can you share some actual examples of a bad advice so we can judge by ourselves ? thanks

The advice here is not good. It may even be counter-productive. Too much focus on getting a good position that you cannot competently play instead of playing openings that develop your competence.

I am starting to suspect that you trying to promote this post... Making relatively easy to disprove/argument  affirmation  to make people reply. 

First you are speaking of a youtube video not a course. On this format Levy give general idea./overivew here Levy is borderline ranting when doing the "explanation"  = he is a content creator and his youtube video are instructional but also mainly for recreational purpose. 

He just show you rapidly why type of trouble you can encounter FAST = if you try to learn this opening you have a lot to master so not a good idea to start here. 

By the way for first opening not trying to pin the knight with the bishop is probably a sound advice for a beginner wanting to learn an openings. 

Course are different, you go in depth, do exercise, drill  ect . So if you take a course on the Ruiz lopez you are going to learn all this. 

This video is aimed mostly at people NOT learning opening in depht ( not at the level of buying AND studying course about them ) but superficially (like me) . In this case choose another one. 

Most of Levy student are well under 1400 elo I guess ( once again like me). 

If you are really serious about improving your game, do not spend money anywhere except Amazon.com. Buy Fine's "Basic Chess Endings" and start there. You can actually find better tactics trainers for free on the internet than the ones at chess.com, or even some chess problem books (which I think are better). Finally, I would suggest a few middlegame books (The Art of the Middlegame by Keres and Kotov is terrific. They spend at least 100 pages on attacking a king castled to the opposite flank) and Reshevsky's "The Art of Positional Play."

Learning positional play is important. Not every position contains tactical solutions, and very often you will be forced to play positionally to reach a satisfactory endgame. Also, the "attack at all cost" crowd can't play positional chess because they've never learned how; when they have to maneuver pieces and look at positional imbalances, they are clueless. Pressing home a win against such players becomes much easier.

If you have a few bucks left, some basic chess opening books are good, but I wouldn't spend a lot of time or money on those. Mostly, you just want to make sure you are able to get out of the opening and into a middlegame with at least equal or winning chances.

Pawn Power by Hans Kmoch is another terrific book.

If you read those books, and practice longer games (not blitz or bullet) you will probably be around 1500-1700.

There is little reason and almost no benefit to learning an opening in depth when you and your opponents are rated below 1800 FIDE. Games are won and lost through elementary tactics, not the opening. 

Beginners and intermediates should learn openings that develop their tactics. Levy's criteria are wrong. A more in-depth course based on the same assumptions shares the same flaws.

He rejects the Spanish (Ruy Lopez) because it has too many lines. That is precisely why it is the best choice. Stop thinking your opening is your problem if you are under 1400. It is not.

Ruy Lopez theory goes 20+ moves deep. I've played the opening for four decades (both as White and Black), although it has never been my main line. The deepest I've gone into theory OTB was move 13. I was Black. We played the Chigorin variation. That game was against a promising junior in 2006. He missed a win (tactical) in the late middle game. My best OTB win was against a USCF expert from the White side of the Spanish. We left theory at move 9. We left my knowledge of the theory with his third move. Familiarity with Karpov's and others games from decades of reviewing them guided me when memory could not. I knew typical ideas. 

Levy misses all that. Chessable courses built on drill also miss it.

When you are mislead, it retards your growth.

Ok that's the explanation :-) 

You simply are not the target audience for Levy course/youtube video and I am kind of surprise that you did not realize this. 

He is pretty clear on his youtube channel about the average level of his viewer and students, you can also see this clearly on the guess the ELO submitted by his suscriber.  A 1500 elo rating would be VERY high there.  Most of his viewer started playing chess 2 years ago, a point in insist on constantly = you guys are newb to chess

As for your analys on opening you are both right and wrong. 

You are right about learning line is the wrong approach to improve as it is pure memory and unless you play pro , your opponent will not play the line past a certain number of move. 

No you are wrong. If you want to be able to understand the tactic on classical chess, you have to know the basic info on the main line = you have to do the grunt memory work first , then go to tactical. 

See this like learning language. 

Yes learning list of vocabulary is a bad tactic. You are going to kill your initial motivation as it is VERY boring and that kind of a low efficiency as it is very unlikely that you will have to use all the word you are learning fast enough to fix them in your working memory + you are not learning the word that are actually useful

No learning list of vocabulary is in fact necessary because unless you have a basic vocabulary to express yourself even if comprise of word that are not really suited to the situation ( you know how to say a "bus"  but you don't no "truck," with bus  you can in fact express the idea of truck (  like a bus but for transporting good ).), you will not be in a position to make use of the more specific vocabulary word you will learn. 

I had to learn Vietnamese after 40 years old with ZERO knowledge of a language of the same family (no pre know vocabulary or grammar structure ) , it has been two years since I started and will now take my driving license exam in Vietnamese. I can still remember the first year where I had to do VERY STUPID/BORING pure memory drill to build a basic vocabulary with many word that I was not seeing myself having to use soon. But once you have this backbone it make learning more specific thing possible. And once you have done it you have a tendency to think that this work was not necessary and that you could have learn so MUCH FASTER going for the specific stuff directly. Dead wrong, everybody do the grunt work first . 

I see the same phenomenon with chess. You have this backbone knowledge on opening already and you don't realize how NOT knowing this would make understanding tactic directly so more challenging. 

i love the way you express your point - its makes perfect sense- the way you explain it - but then follow  me would  you here--- why wouldn't learning the most complex opening move and practicing till its roat -  making you a winner at least to get to middle game with better players - would not the fact that you are playing a very complex opening scare them into making different moves in their own openings -- its sounds good- but i don't think it would happen -- people are stubborn and will stick to their way of doing an opening- even losing and then making a excuse -- hummmmmmm sounds like me i guess -sorry the above statement is totally wrong --  learning basic blocks then adding to them is the way computers think than why not chess players-     

Yes I have the upper hand here. 

I am new to chess , I discover the game around two years ago, no I did not watch the Queen Gambit, I just bought a puzzle game based on chess for my switch and moved from there 

I am above 40, meaning that I have a full time job and have little time to put into the game and know that will never reach an high level ( unless I become unemployed and decide that the best ways to occupy my time is to work on chess full time, very unlikely )

I am therefore PERFECTLY understanding what kind of course would help me improve on chess. 

And as your are CLEARLY no Levy target audience, I am CLEARLY not your target audience. 

In my demographic/chess player profile. Buying a course like this to improve in one specific opening make sense.  I have limited time and if I wanted to improve learning the basic of a specific opening make sense.  Of course for someone more ambitious ( aiming to make a living of chess ) that's not the best way. 

See this as martial art , the majority of practitioner are not aiming at becoming teacher/doing competition regularly and the best training vary A LOT depending on your profile and target use for the skill. 

On a side note, you must know if you are a teacher that those online course are VERY cheap compare to paying for actual in person course, going to a school ect