I am interested to see what others think about the Masterclass.

We are lucky in that Garry gave us far more of his time in this class than any of the other instructors did in theirs.

When I think of what a master class would be, I think of something much different than what Masterclass.com seems to be creating. I imagine a class targeted towards up and coming practitioners in the field (professionals or semi-professionals), put on by a current or former expert practitioner who is mainly sharing what (as well as when, how, and why) he does/did to continue to hone his craft, to stay relevant at his level, and to continue to grow. I expect to come away with a clear understanding of what needs to be done before reaching that stage (the prerequisites), the skills required for mastery in the field and how those are applied, how the expert practitioner goes about his daily work, and a good idea of how the expert thinks about his field - his philosophy of the field, so to speak. Such a class would be about the same length, but I would expect that the cost to attend would be closer to $500 than to $100.

That's not at all what Garry's masterclass is like, but I can't claim to be surprised, either, since the informational trailer had already disabused me of my expectations when he spoke about finding "something for everyone". The result really cannot be called a masterclass; it's more of an immersive introduction to the field by a well-known expert practitioner. I'm guessing that that's probably the case with most of the classes on Masterclass.com, though.

I believe that the resulting "masterclass" suffers from that decision to address such a wide audience, and it's particularly unfortunate that there's so little opportunity for what is uniquely Garry to show through ... I believe that any competent chess player in the world could have delivered at least 85-95% of this masterclass, perhaps not with the same style, force of character, or stage presence as Garry, but really only 5-15% of the masterclass feels like something that is uniquely Garry - the times when he was away from a chessboard. Though I appreciate the quality of his selected examples, having Garry Kasparov teach elementary tactics is like bringing in Mario Andretti to teach driving class to 15 year olds.

Given that the class is what it is, and accepting it on that basis, I nevertheless still think that there is much room for improvement.

Conspicuously missing is any notion of how to think about chess in terms of deciding on which move to play (which is the only thing that really matters in the end), either at or away from the board. No mention of how to assess/evaluate positions - not even anything about Garry's unique method of breaking a position down into just three components: force, time, and quality.

Finally, I am greatly underwhelmed by both the scarcity and lack of difficulty of the exercises. I think that it would have been beneficial to have a much better sense of the immense amount of work and practice that it takes to actually get good, even at simple things like double attacks and skewers. I'd expect at least a few dozen exercises per lesson, with 1/2 aimed at category 4 and 3 players, 1/4 at category 2 and 1, 1/8 at candidate master level, and 1/8 at master level players. A welcome addition would be a selection of a hundred or so of Garry's favorite games (by other players), even with nothing more than a brief note at the critical moment, so as to emphasize playing over master games as an important aspect of chess improvement.

Despite what sounds like a negative review (I intended my critique as constructive criticism for Masterclass.com), I enjoy the class immensely and I think that $90 is very reasonable for any level of access to such a great in any field - and for over 7 total hours of contact time, it's an absolute steal!

Kasparov's Master Class

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