GM Arturs Neiksans

I'm a 40-year-old grandmaster from Latvia and the leading Latvian player, who returned to competitive chess at the late age of 27 in 2010 after graduating with an MBA in Public Relations. After graduating high school, in the period of 2001-2010, I wasn't an active player as I was studying and pursuing a career, not related to chess. Now I'm an experienced coach, author, and tournament commentator. Chess has become a huge part of my life, I love what I'm doing and there's no greater joy to see your student succeed! I'm still playing competitive chess but much less than before. At the moment I'm somewhere around the 2600 ELO mark.

I have played for Team Latvia in six World Chess Olympiads (2000, 2006, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018) and two European Team Championships. I'm a four-time Latvian Champion (1999, 2011, 2015, 2019), winner of the Summer Chess Classic C tournament (Saint Louis, USA, 2019), and winner of the 9th Wunsiedel Chess Festival 2015, shared 1st of RTU Open 2016 A tournament. I played in the FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss in 2021.

I play in several international chess leagues in Europe, including the prestigious French Top 12 and German Bundesliga.

My highest ELO peak was 2631, highest ELO rapid 2674 (World Top 100), highest ELO blitz 2645.

I've been FIDE certified trainer since 2012 and head coach at Riga Chess School from 2010 until 2021. I left the job in October of 2021 to focus more on the current projects.

Among my best former students are GM Nikita Meshkovs, GM Toms Kantans, WGM Laura Rogule, WIM Katrina Skinke, WFM Elizabete Limanovska, FM Arturs Bernotas, FM Dmitrijs Tokranovs and others. Two of them in 2011 became European Youth champions in rapid and blitz.

Occasionally I do additional training sessions with people who are motivated to aim higher!

I've written five Chessable courses (www.chessable.com/author/GMNeiksans):
- Lifetime Repertoires: Reversed Sicilian for Black
- Short & Sweet: Reversed Sicilian for Black
- Lifetime Repertoires: Kan Sicilian for Black
- Short & Sweet: Kan Sicilian for Black
- 100 Repertoires: King's Indian Attack for White

The 6th course "100 Repertoires: Dutch Leningrad" is currently being written and scheduled to be released in Spring 2024.

I'm also an author of the popular trilogy about the Anti-Sicilian approach for Modern Chess - three courses on how to play against Najdorf, 2...Nc6 and Paulsen, and also a Positional Repertoire against the Caro-Kann.

Recently I have tried to focus more on providing commentary on high-level chess tournaments - I've done many commentary jobs for Chess.com, Chess24, FIDE, ECU, and also some respectable open tournaments like Biel Chess Festival and RTU Open.

I always prefer to focus on individual sessions - I believe they are the most effective. My strongest skills are positional understanding and endgames - this is where I excel most.

While openings are very important in competitive chess, I’m not an expert in every single line. There are variations that I know extremely well and usually they are Anti-approach and simple-to-learn lines, a huge number of variations I know well above average since I follow the trends as a chess coach, and a few – very vaguely.

I’ve never considered myself an expert in highly topical and the most popular openings. For example, I’ve never bothered to study the Poisoned Pawn structure in the Najdorf, the Botvinnik system in the Semi-Slav, Meran, I don’t like the Berlin in the Ruy Lopez, etc. Obviously, I do know them to some extent, but I’ve never studied them in detail as I believe in my philosophy that openings aren’t everything. Sure, they are extremely important to beat a 2650+ player as you can’t beat them otherwise and often need a novelty to get somewhere but below that you can play pretty much anything you want, and focus on stuff that doesn’t outdate so quickly.

Occasionally I find myself in situations where I have limited knowledge about the system that my student wants to play and that is completely normal. This is when I learn together with the student – I invest time to study it, what is popular and what is not, and create a Chessbase / Lichess study. However, I also do believe that it is extremely important for the student to have good working capabilities and expand analysis even further on his own. A good approach would be – I give a starting file on what’s good and what's not, we work on it during our session and it’s improved by the student afterward. From time to time I can create homework and we work on the results in the next sessions.

For training sessions I prefer Zoom.

You can contact me by writing an e-mail to arturs.neiksans@gmail.com