Loves studying Chess. Wants to be a Chess Coach, some day.

Enjoys sharing favored practical resources, to help beginners improve.

Favorite Quotes:

Seek dynamic play:
- "Play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the endgame like a machine." - Rudolph Spielmann
Control the center:
- "Tactics flow from a superior position." - Bobby Fischer
  - Honorable mention: “Put ya pieces in da CENTAH!” - Coach IM Andras Toth - Shoutout to his beautiful passionate video commentary in his Chessable Course: “Chess Principles Reloaded - Center”. It really woke up my sense for how absolutely crushing using central control can become, once players know the game well enough to sense how to capitalize.
Positional gem:
- "Any moment that one piece can control, inhibit, or tie down two or more pieces, a potentially critical imbalance is created on the rest of the board." - Joshua Waitzkin - Book: The Art of Learning
Reduce the ego:
- "Focus on a goal that is about self-mastery, rather than one about beating others." - John Briley, in the Washington Post
A healthy view on rating bias:
- "There is no rating. Give your best effort to evaluate the position, come up with plans for you and your opponent, calculate, and trust yourself like you’re a GM. After the game is where you can start critiquing your evaluation / ideas / calculations." - Bob Weidenhoeft, first chess coach

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Favorite options for beginners:

Academy-style Training

ChessDojo Training Program - Love the well-rounded guidance, attention to optimal health concerns, and awesome tools for accountability. Also a huge fan of their ‘no engine’ commentary streams.

Independent Study

Speed Chess / Minimal study
- Chessbrah’s “Building Habits” series on Youtube.
Slow Chess / Max effort
- Note: For learning material that doesn’t include full-board visualization; following along on a physical chess board is ideal, an awesome permanent alternative is to copy them into a private Lichess Study.
- First books: “Chess Fundamentals” by Capablanca (A very wholistic Chess book that you can refer to many times over; Forward Chess provides a completely free, mobile-friendly, eBook, with a very convenient interactive board & audio options), “Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations & Games” (I recommend using a for study of beautiful short checkmates, that get surprisingly tough to find), “Logical Chess Move by Move” (move by move commentary, that hammers repeatedly on significant opening concerns), “Chess: The Art of Logical Thinking” (also move by move commentary, with a a wonderful focus on various opening styles)
- Basic Tactics: Any online resource with themed puzzles should work. I suggest Lichess, since it’s completely free, has themed puzzles, and assorted options via “Puzzle Streak” and “Healthy Mix”
- Chessable courses (organized roughly by difficulty): (1) The Chess Elevator (2) Breaking 1000 (loved the lengthy verbal explanations, especially to better understand what separates beginners from intermediate strength) (3) Introduction to Chess Calculation (an absolute game changer, for calculating more efficiently in many positions) (4) Preventing Blunders (5) Silman’s Complete Endgame Course (love the tier-based learning format) (6) Basic Checkmate Patterns (7) My Opponent’s Move (8) The Value of Pawns (love how likely this course’s material is to be relevant to a high percentage of chess games) (9) The Checkmate Patterns Manual (one of the absolute best resources, for building a stronger intuition for attacks) (10) Chess Tactics from Scratch (extremely well explained, at the micro level, but many exercises are very hard to solve without a strong knowledge of mating patterns and basic tactics)
  - Why Chessable? - Because it’s got (1) minimal reason for a regular subscription (2) many high quality themed training resources, via one-time purchases (3) some decent free resources (4) easily usable spaced repetition (5) great organization options (6) easy interaction with authors/community on exercises via forum posts
- Books (after Chessable courses): “Simple Chess” (provides a basis for a slow build-up, starting with aiming for small yet permanent advantages, studying awareness and usage of strategic advantages, and aiming to wait for an ‘avalanche of sacrifices’ until the position shows a very dominant advantage), “The Power of Pawns” (gaining a deep understanding of important pawn structures, and surrounding strategies, especially in the middlegame), “The Amateur’s Mind” (a great start for evaluating imbalances, with insights noted from many rated levels), “Art of Attack in Chess” (to better understand when and how one can pour on the aggression!)
Openings
- Despite spending a great deal of time studying Opening courses myself; I recommend sticking to just enough opening theory & practice, to ‘survive most of the time’.
- Reasoning:
  - Chess is a hard game, with a lot of complex components. Most low Elo players will rarely stick to logical opening theory lines for long, and they are also very unlikely to know how to make strong use of positions that are still roughly equal in material, no matter what post-game engine analysis may tell them.
  - Thus, while some light opening study may sometimes be beneficial, the reality is that, once a player knows how to avoid opening traps, they are unlikely to get much more benefit at a low Elo from opening study. This logic likely applies until like 2000+ rating, when players have finally gotten so strong that they are actually more likely to follow some popular opening logic more often, because otherwise their opponent will likely get the better of them.

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