Even if he costs a lot more, choose the experienced coach. Teaching takes a lot of practice and preparation, all by itself. Few are extremely successful at it. You seem to have found one.
You don't need to learn all the latest lines. You are still working on fundamentals.
You must know this. It's common sense. There must be something else you're not telling us.
We don't have all the details here, but it seems that the coach is by far the better choice.
He aleady has a track record of helping ten people to reach GM...
His rating being in the 2200's means nothing; only his ability to teach is important...
If option B is an active player, he may not be that interested in taking students on. If he is... how many students has he taught before, what did they achieve?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts guys, much appreciated.
First of all, let me say that I am also tempted to go for the coach at this point.
I don't know any of Option B's students. He is definitely interested in taking on students, and he told me, if we were to work together, I would need to send him around 30 recent games of mine with a standard time control before the first lesson, and he would then come up with an initial training plan for us to start with.
What I liked about Option B is that he seems to apply a very individual training plan. He also gives homeworks etc., which I am definitely happy to have.
Option A is yet to get back to me with his answers to a set of similar questions (individual study plan, homeworks, etc). The thing that worries me about going with Option A is that if he has too many students then how can he actually prepare personal lessons for each student? Ideally, I'd want my coach to prepare some individual content ahead of the lesson, and I am not sure how this can ne achieved if he has many students. Some GM was advertising having more than 50 students currently to attract even more students, how can that be a good thing for the students?!
With Option B, since he is active, I believe he'll be having a limited number of students so he can (as he said to me himself) prepare a specific training plan.
Of course, I'll only know about this more once Option A gets back to me. This is only my guess that the number of students he has will be higher than Option B's.
I suggest you try out both of them and male a list of points thats important to you and rate both for each point, like
- is he custom tailoring his teachings to YOUR specific level of competency and mindset or is he just giving you the same generic lessons he gives to everyone ?
- if you go over your past games together and talk about the mistakes you did and how to avoid them in the future, how good were you able to understand his explanations ? Do you feel it was helpful ?
- do you understand his speech patterns well and do you like or dislike they way he explains things to you ? Is he patient when explaining things you don't understand at once ?
- how many pupils does he have ? will you be an important pupil to him or just some guys for additional money while he concentrates on the pupils he really cares about ?
- does he motivate you to work hard or does it more feel like a chore to you ?
- do you feel you can trust this person ?
- do you come away from the lesson with more confidence or less ?
- do you feel the price is fair for the service offered ?
- is he communicating well ? does he communicate a lot with you or just give you tasks or puzzles to solve ?
Hi all! First post here, so apologies if I'm not following any forum rules that I am not aware of.
Being a 1700-1800 player who played in an amateur fashion for 15 years or so, I've finally decided to take chess more seriously and will be working with a coach regularly. I am thinking for at least a year, and see where it goes from then on.
In terms of the coach selection, I am basically down to two options, and cannot really decide which one makes more sense.
Option A is an experienced coach, who doesn't really actively play chess, his rating is in 2200s. Instead, he coaches players and sometimes national teams, he has raised more than 10 GMs over his coaching career (most of them started training with him when they had no titles whatsoever).
Option B is one of the GMs that Option A has raised. He is young and he is still an active player.
In terms of pricing, the difference is really very small, so I wouldn't worry about it if I decided to go with the more expensive option (which is Option A).
I would greatly appreciate any thoughts on this.