COACHING

I have gone from scratch to 2400 online Blitz, 2000 OTB in just 2 years. How? It isn't what you might think. I never engaged in deliberate study, nor did I ever receive any coaching. All I did was play and analyse some of my games.

"Wait, that's it? All I have to do to progress as fast as you is play and analyse?"

Not so fast. While I didn't realise it at the time, my approach to analysis was actually highly systematic, very personalised, and very nuanced. It isn't something that I can compress into a neat, generalisable guide, but it's ABSOLUTELY something that I can construct specifically for you through personalised, interactive sessions. Roughly speaking, the way that I will do that is by:

Through a series of games and, where need be, exercises, identifying strategic and tactical concepts that you appear to struggle with (and, by "concepts", I don't mean generalised stuff like "rooks behind passed pawns" or anything like that; I mean highly specific and nuanced principles that are tailored to you as a chess player).
Explaining said concepts both theoretically and practically, giving examples from real games that you played as well as practice problems centred around said concepts.
Ingraining said concepts into your long-term memory using various heuristic methods, ranging from thought process algorithms to apply in your own games to your good ol' tactics puzzles.

In other words, I will be supplying you with all the tools that enabled me to progress from beginner to expert in 2 years. If you are willing to collaborate in this process, I can almost guarantee rapid improvement.

Currently accepting beginners and intermediates (800-1800 chess.com/0-1600 FIDE) at a rate of £20 an hour. If you're interested, shoot me a private message on chess.com or email me at maxkho00@gmail.com and we'll discuss the details.

Languages: English, Russian, Polish, French

ABOUT ME

Hi! I'm Maxim (Max) Khovanski, Bachelor of Mathematics & Statistics and Master of Data Science. I had lived my whole life hating chess, without ever understanding how one could possibly keep pushing wood around the same 64 squares for longer than 10 minutes, let alone hours or *cough* days *cough* on end. That was until just before the 2020 New Year's Day, when my brother borderline blackmailed me into playing this game:

Honestly, not a bad game for a complete beginner. I will admit and say that I was already slightly intrigued about the game of chess at this point.

However, it took me until the start of 2020 to play my first real game against someone who wasn't my brother, and it was THEN that things really started taking off.

Once again, I'm pretty proud of this considering this will have been one of my first chess games ever. I developed my pieces in the opening and found a fork in the middlegame.

Since then, I have played thousands of games and spent hours upon hours watching chess content on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit. Chess became my new all-encompassing hobby, dethroning even football, which I have loved (and still do) for the entire duration of my life. The amount of effort I have put into chess, even if not into rigorous study, and my sheer enthusiasm for the game allowed me to get to where I am now, which is 2500 at the time of writing.

While chess has been arguably my predominant hobby from 2020 to 2023, here are some of my other interests which I also regularly partake in: football, tennis, cutting shapes, table tennis, philosophy, linguistics, bouldering. And here are some other ones that I don't practice as regularly anymore: judo, music composition, physics/cosmology, and a bunch of other things that I cannot recall.

Thanks for visiting my page and (possibly) see you in-game!

EXTRA

My article on AlphaZero is blowing up on Towardsdatascience!

maxkho2