Review of thechessworld.com

So I went ahead and spent €43 to try a course named Supercharge your Chess Training Program. It's on sale for $49 instead of $129 so I gave it a shot.

After payment, you're presented with a page where you have to click three times (!) through a "no thanks" link because they attempt to seduce you three times to buy an additional product. The "buy" button is huge, but the "no thanks" button is just a small link just below the huge button; Meaning, it's very easy to miss-click...

Two of the offered products are Igor Smirnov's. I'm amazed how his name often pops up with sleaze tricks. 

I'm now ready to follow my SuperCharge course.

The Course

You have to download three PDF's, one of them being mandatory: a course outline explaining what you should know for today, and which is also a mini-tutorial with covers a few endgame and strategic concept at a very rudimentary level. For example the 4th day explains why you should keep a training journal. You can download a pre-made empty pdf to print out, which serves as a personal journal.

Day 5 is hilarious: it teaches you how to avoid blunders. Here are the magic steps:

1. Think about the move you’re about to make.
2. Write your move down before making it.
3. Think about that move again for 10-15 seconds before playing it.

I'm not kidding you.  That is the gist of the whole chapter, though there was plenty of useless padding such as anecdotes.

The Main Course

So everyday you'll read the chapter for that day and then you go to the website and do the following:

1. Analyze a game with comments.

2. Solve 6 tactical puzzles

3. Solve an endgame. The main theme is explained in the answer.

As you can see in the screenshot, the actual content is in a small widget. This is the standard.  Of course you can magnify it, but the point is that everything on this website reeks of cheap design.

But wait. There is more.

On top of this they offer 3 extra chapters, each part of a 14-day course in Positional play (such as minority attack, bishop pair, hanging pawn), endgame course and finally an opening chapter which is nothing but a download to a PDF which explains how to use database software.

The Positional and Endgame course is ridiculously basic.

An endgame chapter covers king and pawn endgames. It explains the magic square and the next topic in said chapter is a king vs a far broken through pawn. The opposition tutorial is to be found in a few chapters further down the road in a different course! And that one too is extremely basic - not worth of its own chapter at all. But you'll find absolutely nothing about key squares or the trebuchet formation.

Another example is the the chapter called Rook vs Bishop Endgame. Well, there's nothing "endgame" about that lesson. It's only a mating tutorial if a mate is possible, without pawns or anything. I was really looking forward to this chapter, but nothing but an ice cold shower for me.

Buggy and Sloppy

The website is also buggy: to get back into the member area of this course, one has to log out to log in again, otherwise the website won't recognize you even though have logged in. Also the website advises not to use Firfefox as some have reported errors with it... On the profile page I see remnants of Administrator tools, though the user-rights are luckily taken away. But some WordPress rubbish has been left behind and they have spent ZERO time in developing this WordPress-based website; I see members writing stuff in a feedback section (which I can access only by going into my profile page!) . The feedback of recent posts is in some small default Wordpress box or something.

Endgame Trainer

Also, this "Endgame Trainer" they advertise with, which you "have access to", is not what you might think.

In endgame chapters you're offered a fixed few interactive endgame positions (2 to 4). You can make your move and then some engine makes a move back. It's not like you can generate a set of well defined endgame problems and practice them ad nauseum or anything. It has nothing to do with "having access to a sophisticated endgame trainer". One could argue that's it's a ambiguous statement, but that's the whole point isn't it? This whole website reeks of it!

Tough Reading

Finally there are a lot of typos and clearly the author was a non-English speaker as the grammar is simply horrible. Sometimes I had to read a sentence 4 or 5 times to understand an explanation.

And then there is this:

257 is quite an exact number to advertise with . This website is one big red flag.

Time for a Refund

For somebody who "doesn't want my money", they sure do not have a decent refund policy as my request for a refund has been denied. Only refunds for videos exist and their Academy. Both carry their own unique Terms of Service. So three TOS in total!  They offered a replacement course but I rejected as they had their chance already. I'm not interested in their courses anymore.

Aftermath

They claim I have access to this:

So I wrote to them that this doesn't exist so more reasons to give back my moneys.

To be continued...

TL;DR: stay the heck away from this website

Thanks for saving me money! I literally Goolged this review moments before clicking into it.