During my recent trip to England one of the more fun things I did was to record a video together with my friend David. Our idea was to show how a lesson with a grandmaster looks like.

My training process is centered on improving the student’s thinking process. The logic is that a better thinking process will lead to a better decision. The “correction” is performed by closely monitoring the student’s thoughts and commenting on the critical moments.

I set up various positions for the students to think about. Often these positions do not have a “solution” as such – they are like real-life examples from the games in a tournament. The position would be a complex one where a decision needs to be made. I even expect different students to have different preferences and choose different moves. This is normal, as we all have different styles and understand chess in our own personal way. Idiosincracies are perfectly fine, my job is only to make sure they are based on correct foundations. In chess there foundations are precise calculation and evaluation.

The position I chose for our training with David is from the famous game Flohr-Spielmann from Bled 1931. Those of you who regularly read my newsletter (and the others can use the yellow box on the right to subscribe) already know that I made a thorough analysis of this position as a way to demonstrate how chess understanding has evolved over the years. During the video, being somewhat restricted by time, I couldn’t really go over with David with all the knight moves in the starting position and in a real-life lesson we would have analysed Flohr’s choice in more depth. After all, the aim of the video was to give an idea how an 1-hour lesson looks like and normally the work continues in the next one.

With all these explanations as a way of introduction, I now invite you to take a look at the video on my YouTube channel. I am really looking forward to hear your impressions!