July 30th, 2025: I'm taking break from all my coaching work, due to illness.
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NOTE. I add as friends, normally, people whom I personally know. Sorry!
COACHING. Languages: English, Russian or Ukrainian. (Details below).

ABOUT ME
Mikhail Golubev. Chess GRANDMASTER (IGM since 1996. Ukrainian Champion 1996. Winner of the Swiss Open Championship in 1999, etc; best Elo: 2570 in 1995).
JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, TRAINER, ORGANISER from Odessa, Ukraine.
Website: mikhailgolubev.wordpress.com Wiki (Eng): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Golubev
My blog here: www.chess.com/blog/MikhailGolubev E-mail: gmi@europe.com

COACHING
I have been giving online chess lessons since December 2019. I prefer to work with those who wish to play at a serious international level. Normally I don't work with beginners. As, formerly, a professional player for many years, I know what serious, professional chess is about. I have worked as a coach or assistant, in particular, with the world champions Ruslan Ponomariov and Anatoly Karpov, and with many European and World youth/junior champions (U-10 ... U-20).
Chess improvement is about making your weakest areas stronger. My usual training method is, most normally, looking at the student's games first, and then it becomes clear which aspects of his/her play deserve to be improved ASAP. When the main problem is solved, then another problem takes its place, and so on. Being people, players are all very different, so my approach is individual. It's partly based on my experience as a student in the "Botvinnik School" in the USSR of the 1980s.
The most usual/main directions of work with students are concrete opening preparation and analysis of student's games. (To a lesser extent it can be such things as general middlegame strategies, not directly connected to the student's repertoire openings, and general endgame preparation).
Not all students are willing to work on their own and I respect any attitude - though, indeed, the desire to work individually, between lessons, is very helpful to the coach and even more for the student him/herself. I can also play against students. In any case, you have to play chess regularly, otherwise no one will be able to help you to improve as a chess-player!
For online coaching, I mostly use Zoom (or Microsoft Teams) with a Chess.com (or Lichess) analysis board. My hourly rate is 40 USD. Contact me if you have any questions: gmi@europe.com

BOOKS
June 2017: my new book, Understanding the Sicilian, is released. June 2018: The French edition, Comprendre la Sicilienne, is published.
My chess books at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mikhail-Golubev/e/B0034PRE2K

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