The Universal Training System with GM Jesse Kraai

“A bus,” I said looking at a toy double-decker red bus standing next to a house plant. “Will I get it?”

“No papa!” came the reply. Very clear, I thought. So I didn’t get it. Instead, I watched as my two-year-old child disappeared from the room in the house we were staying in. There was a fair bit of banging and scraping. A few shouts of frustration. Eventually, the door burst open and into the room there slowly emerged an office chair. There was a towel stuck in one of the wheels rendering all of them completely useless. My son entered the room behind the chair at a 45-degree angle, pushing the towel impeded-chair across the floor with a red face. Passing the boundary of the bedroom, he stopped to close the door behind him for no perceivable reason. He then pressed forward until he was blocked by a few suitcases. They took him a further 5-10 minutes to clear. Finally, the chair was positioned below the shelves. He dragged himself onto the seat, stood up and reached both his arms into the air. He was still about a meter shy of reaching the bus. He looked at me. I looked back, laughing on the bed with my hands behind my head, watching the whole thing like a good movie.

“Papa, help me” he said.

Help Me, Papa Kraai

Like my son, I can be a stubborn son of bitch. And when I had the opportunity, the good fortune, and the privilege to beta test the now thriving ChessDojo Training Program - I probably didn’t make the best use of it. As I looked through the list of recommended materials for study in my rating band my immediate thought was: nope. There is no way I’m reading Winning Chess Strategies because first of all, I am a strategic wizard compared to everyone else in my rating band, and secondly, I’ve made a deal with myself to study endgames for the next three years, I’m nine months into that process, strategy isn’t due up until 2025 at the earliest so I’ll see you then Yasser. I won’t be hearing your thoughts on weak square colour outposts and... other positional stuff until then. Besides, I’m sure as shit not giving up endgames at this point. I’m fully committed. I’ve eaten my breakfast over dry endgame theory books and fought Stockfish in those positions for nine months, and if I switch now I will have suffered through all of that for nothing. Nothing!

So here I was, having finished my month of beta testing (or in my case beta avoiding) of the ChessDojo Training Program, and I’m about to interview one of its creators. I’m about to tell them that basically, I had my own study plan before theirs existed. A guy called Neal Bruce told me about it, I tweaked it, now it was perfect, and I had no need for any other training program, thank you very much. I was prepared to concede that for some people, who were surely less disciplined and capable humans than me, it might be a perfectly good plan. But I had self-discipline and my own flawless plan, so I was good.

And so this is that interview.

Except not really. There were actually a lot of really cool elements to the program that I am excited to discuss in this article. The conversation itself was genuinely transformative for me too. Jesse was the first Grandmaster I had ever spoken to and I took his words of wisdom seriously.

So what’s the article about? I set out to interview Jesse about his PlusEqualMinus philosophy because it was something I wanted to incorporate into my own chess improvement path. We ended up discussing that in the context of its place as one of the three pillars of the new ChessDojo Training Program. But beyond that, we talked about me, someone who has largely tried to clear their own path through the forest of chess improvement and what Jesse’s thoughts were on my approach so far.

So to begin let’s look at the PlusEqualMinus principle, that was what the interview was meant to be about and was something Grandmaster Jesse Kraai learned from one of his students, podcaster James Altucher.

“I have a student, his name is James Altucher, he was the one who turned me on to the idea of PlusEqualMinus, and he got it from an MMA fighter. And this MMA fighter was like dude, when I try to learn karate or jujitsu or whatever it is, then I am always looking for someone above me to teach, a sparring partner to spar with and then people who don't have the skills I have to explain stuff too. And then the idea that James kind of expounded on and that I have taken to the chess world is: this is how you can improve at anything. So you need the people to competitively be around, to whom you're not going to cede any ground at all, those are the people you are going to fight with, hopefully with a good mindset and not in an evil way. And then you are going to need somebody to whom you give authority, so it’s not like they are always right or anything, but you’re kind of digesting their words more than you would in the form of a struggle, as you would with the people you were sparring with.

You know, because a lot of times you will hear things that are valuable but you don’t give them time to sink in or process them, you know you just dismiss them, either because you don’t understand them or because they seem wrong at first. And that's the advantage of giving someone the place of power, of being above you.

And then maybe the most anti-intuitive thing is the idea that coaching [someone else] could be really helpful. One of the things in my personal background, that when I first heard about this philosophy, made me think: oh absolutely. I’d been doing chess forever, and when I was trying to make GM, as a job, trying to make ends meet when I was very poor, I helped start the chess site called Chess Lecture, and it had terrible audio and stuff - this was way back in the day. It forced me though, every week I would do a lecture, and it forced me to be clear about what I was thinking. Not only about my own games, but I would present on other people’s games, endgames, all kinds of stuff. And each of those times I would be forced to explain in the clearest words I could find what was going on. And so, years later, when I heard the idea of PlusEqualMinus I thought: of course!”

I had at the time of the interview, just put out a coaching offer, and I am lucky enough to now have a few students who I enjoy working with. So I have the ‘minus’ part in place. I am also lucky to have a couple of great sparring partners around my level who I enjoy playing with regularly as my equals. But the ‘plus’ is something that still eludes me. Perhaps that is why I leaned so heavily into that topic during our interview. It was the void I was (and still am) looking to fill in my chess life.

Click here to book a free 60-minute chess lesson with me.

Before we get into the concept of having a ‘plus’, and chess mentorship in general, I want to say that this interview was quite transformational for me. In many ways having this conversation was me talking to the exact kind of mentor I had been missing. My interview with Grandmaster Jesse Kraai and the subsequent consideration and writing of this article made me change my rigid views about structure and mentorship in my own personal chess journey.

That’s all partly because during our conversation, I felt a little bit like I was trying to get a red bus called chess improvement down off a shelf, and sitting nearby watching me (and pissing himself laughing) was GM Jesse Kraai.

The Plus - Finding Mentorship in Chess

I felt like Jesse understood me. I often hear him talk in his videos about when he was a kid growing up, and learning about chess, that he couldn’t afford a chess coach. That made me feel a sort of connection to the man before I met him. And it gave me hope. He got better at chess on his own, so maybe I could too, even as an adult. I’ll admit a part of me loves the fact that I am flying the chess improvement plane solo. A part of me loves the solitariness of the journey. The feeling of exposure one can imagine you might feel free climbing something hard. I love and hate the endless wrestle with self-doubt, the feeling of accomplishing something alone, on my own merits, without any help. But I’ll admit, there’s also a part of me that knows that if I could have a coach, I would have a coach. But I shove those feelings down as deep as possible. I look at other adult improvers with a coach and I think: I don’t need that. I’ve got my books. I’ve got my brain. And I’m going to get better than you, faster than you.

I think people call that jealousy.

In all seriousness, during my conversation with Jesse, it became pretty clear I had an issue deferring any semblance of control over my chess study to anyone, or any program. I told him about that and he had some empathy as well as some great insights into the role of a coach, mentor or a ‘plus’ in one's chess improvement journey.

“I didn’t have a coach for the longest time either and the thing about a coach is that usually, you need to pay the coach something, and that is already a problem for most of us! And then also there is the stubbornness - why can’t I learn this on my own? And a lot of time what's interesting about a coach too is, it’s not just the things he or she tells you in terms of advice or insight - it's just a structure to be accountable too. If you just are left to your own devices, you’ll probably end up repeating the same things and doing the same easy-calorie-diet that you had before, whereas if you have someone telling you: okay this is what we are doing, you are far more likely to hold the line.”

I told Jesse that I didn’t really struggle with discipline, in fact if anything, that was one of the reasons Neal Bruce’s methodology was so attractive to me, because I saw a part of myself in Neal and I knew I could hold myself accountable to hard, daily practice and study. And I have.

But I wasn’t ready to dismiss the idea of a mentor just because of that. I still want that ‘plus’ person to be part of my chess life. So I started to probe and ask more about this mentor figure I was missing. I started by asking how far ahead of you Jesse thinks a ‘plus’ should be. I told him that I had taken four lessons with Fionn O'Donovan last year, whose insights into my opening development issues saw me jump 200 rating points over the course of a month and a half. And Fionn is not a titled player, in fact his Lichess classical rating is just 200 points higher than mine - but that didn’t matter at all. In fact, I thought it made him better able to relate to me.

“I do believe ratings really do reflect where people are at, but something that’s interesting with chess coaching is that you’ve got loads of older players that are now on the decline, whose ratings are just crashing dude, because the mind starts deteriorating. But you know why they lose in the game? Because when you're older, it's hard to get that quick precision that you need to play well. But this coach that I have and other coaches who are older, they have immense experience. So there are loads of older GMs out there, who aren’t much higher rated than me, who would be great coaches for me. Some of those have ratings that have fallen below mine - but they could still be my coach, you know?

One thing I am pretty sure of, is that if I got Magnus or Fabi to be my coach, I don’t think it would work that well. I mean of course, I would be honoured and it would be an interesting experience, but in terms of what they would be able to tell me? I don’t know. I am doubtful. Because they are just all in their own head about what they’ve got going on. They haven’t been coaching themselves for a long time. They're at the highest level and that's a great thing. What I am trying to say is, it’s not always the rating distance between you and the coach that's the defining factor, but there has to be some kind of part in you that believes this person either has some kind of experience or some kind of insight that you admire.”

This makes an enormous amount of sense to me. I am not a titled or even a high-rated player. But I am a chess coach and I do really believe I bring value to my students’ chess knowledge and skills. In fact, I believe part of the value I bring is in my understanding of their situation, because I am not so far from it myself. I remember what it was like to be where they are now - because I was there myself just a year ago. I’m not even sure I see myself as much of a teacher - although I do teach - because most of what I do is provide structure, accountability and motivation. I’m there for my students everyday to pick them up after their losses and celebrate their wins, I’m there to make sure they do the training they have committed to doing. I’m there for them as a coach as much as I am there for them as a teacher of chess.

With that in mind, Jesse’s answer also gave me pause. In my decision to cherry-pick what I did and didn’t follow in the ChessDojo Training Program during the beta test, was I essentially saying that I didn’t respect Jesse, Kostya and David? I knew that I did. I like to listen to Jesse’s philosophising on chess improvement, and those thoughts help guide my own training philosophy, but better than that, in a really concrete way, I have won games I wouldn’t have won if it wasn’t for all three ChessDojo instructors’ videos. There is one rook endgame video by Kostya in particular that changed the way I play, gave me confidence and is still something I think about when I enter a rook and pawn endgame. His teaching is a class act. So it wasn’t a lack of respect or admiration that gave me resistance to the program.

I admitted to Jesse that if he was my coach, I would happily give away total control of my own chess training, at which point he asked me what exactly it was I did for chess training. So I told him about my plan to study the endgame for three years.

I would say he laughed for a good minute.

GM Jesse Kraai interview by Ono @TheOnoZone

I sat there until he had recovered enough for me to ask some clarifying questions. To hear exactly how Jesse made fun of me, you can sign up to my Patreon page and listen to the full audio interview. I will say, it was a real honour to be torn apart. I felt like Kostya or David during an episode of Endgame Sensei.

When he finally calmed down, I told Jesse I was suddenly feeling a bit self-conscious about my approach to studying the game of chess.

“Well, I try to be open minded about everything. I think, one of the things about doing three years of endgames is that first of all - that’s pretty hectic. Because you would need to be guided in that study in some kind of way. And the other thing that probably hasn’t happened in your own games, is that you haven’t gotten enough endgames yet to where you can appreciate the importance of the endgame. Most beginning players are terrible at endgames. And then technical endgames too are definitely interesting and important, but if you were sparring say certain types of strategic endgames, then that would make a little bit more sense to me. Then maybe I could imagine what we’re talking about.

I do think studying endgames is a great introduction to strategic thinking just in terms of having less pieces on the board and thinking about the inter-relationships strategically between those smaller number of pieces. Then you can extrapolate, you can really understand what a bad piece is in an endgame, more than you can in a middlegame. Anyways, I am just trying to make your program work.”

I admitted to Jesse that over the course of the last nine months, the endgame theory that I had learned had directly contributed to exactly two victories. Those weren’t the only theoretical endgames I had reached, but the only ones in which my knowledge of the position (and my opponent’s lack of it, relatively speaking) had won me the game. But even as I stumbled to defend myself, I could feel something shift in my thinking. Perhaps I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Maybe my commitment to three years of endgames was a bit suboptimal. To be clear, daily tactics training and games are also part of my training, but the knowledge study part is dedicated to the endgame for now. I study it for around half an hour to an hour each day.

Jesse’s point about sparring was a good one. That was a part of the ChessDojo Training Program I did lean into - and that I truly loved. I got to play out a pawn ending against another member of my rating band’s 'cohort’ and not only was it much more fun than facing Stockfish, it also felt like there was more at stake, knowing there was a sentient being making the moves against me. The analysis afterwards was also just a more tangible learning experience. Months have passed since those sparring sessions, but I still remember the lessons I took from those matches. I can’t say the same about my rook endgame battles with my android nemesis Stockfish, even though those were more frequent.

For self-preservation, I decided to steer the conversation away from myself and back onto chess mentorship before I got too embarrassed. I wanted to ask more about mentorship in chess. I wanted to know more about the ‘plus’ in Jesse’s PlusEqualMinus philosophy that he had learned from James Altucher. One of the questions I had, was if Jesse had any advice for people like me who wanted a mentor, but couldn’t afford to have a chess coach on a regular basis.

“So we are coming out with this ChessDojo Training Program. And definitely part of the motivation was a lot of people, especially over the last couple of years during the chess boom, reached out to me by email or through social media and they were like: “Jesse, you must help me become GM within the next two years”. And you know, I wanted to help them, but I was just too busy, and a lot of them too wouldn’t have been able to afford the rates that I was charging. So we’ve done all kinds of things at the Dojo. There is a lot that’s going into it [the ChessDojo Training Program] philosophically and pedagogically, but definitely a big part of it is that there is a huge amount of people out there that need the structure of some kind of coaching system and can’t afford a coach. And even then, it’s even happened that a lot of people have come to me and even said, I have really looked for a coach and I can’t find one, because all of the coaches are super busy now. For coaching, that's amazing.”

The ChessDojo Training Program is very cheap for what you get. It’s priced at 15 dollars a month or 100 dollars a year. The yearly price is less than some Grandmasters charge for a single, hour-long lesson. And despite my refusal to look at the suggested book material in Winning Chess Strategies, in my month of beta I had the valuable opportunity to submit my analysed games to be reviewed by the Dojo’s Senseis. On top of that, I got hours of sparring and analysis in against other members of my ‘cohort’ in challenging endgame and middlegame positions. The ChessDojo is basically providing a middle ground for those of us who can’t afford regular one-to-one chess coaching, but still are looking for that kind of coaching experience. And I was starting to think that might be me as well.

“There are a lot of people who are trying to figure it out on their own - like you are. And one of things I have noticed with that kind of person (your kind of person) is they’re looking at all kinds of stuff online and then kind of bouncing from one thing to another. There is just so much material out there for suggestions for people to do, and then what happens is that the person will try one thing for a while, and then they’ll move to another thing, they’ll read something else and they’ll think: okay I’ll check that out. And they’ll kind of be bouncing around without having a structure and then what ultimately happens is that they are going to binge on blitz and 10+0 games.”

Jesse pretty accurately described my first year in chess there. I was bouncing around all over the place, reading a book on this, then watching a video about that. I never stuck with any topic long enough to really absorb it. I knew that, and that is why when I saw what Neal Bruce was doing - I grabbed onto it and didn’t let go. I was desperate for structure. And Neal gave that to me. But what I was hearing, was that there were other ways to structure your chess training. Perhaps I didn’t need to study endgames exclusively for years to make it stick. Perhaps I could do something like Zach Cramer describes in his interview on The Chess Journey’s Podcast where he studied one topic at a time in blocks of six weeks. That seemed less... intense. Maybe I would like that. The things Jesse was saying were making me start to reconsider my approach to studying the game of chess.

“So let’s just say the smart money is that you, Ono, are not going to do three years of endgame study. It might happen! But the smart money is that you're not going to make three years. It’s just going to be too much.”

There was a sort of ‘just you wait and see’ motivation coming from what Jesse was telling me. Maybe Jesse should be my coach. Perhaps he intuitively knew within half an hour how to motivate me. Throughout the interview, I had slowly been thinking about abandoning my Neal Bruce-like philosophy with thoughts of Zach Cramer and the ChessDojo Training Program. But now that Jesse told me he thought I couldn’t do it, part of me felt the sudden and immense desire to do it anyway, even if I now thought it was suboptimal, just to prove him wrong. See you in three years Grandmaster Kraai.

Playing and Analysing Classical Chess Games

We moved on from the PlusEqualMinus thing to talk about the other two pillars of the ChessDojo Training Program’s philosophy.

“The ChessDojo [Training] Program, very simply has three basic ideas. One is the PlusEqualMinus. Another is the idea of a sparring system. So you would learn skills in endgames, middlegames, openings - through sparring with people around your level and getting a sense of how your peers think about things. You would do a lot of your other work with them too. And that's the next point. Pillar number two is that we really believe that studying your own games is what's going to make you improve, and so, for example, the biggest problem I see with what you are doing is you’re playing a quick game.”

As part of my training, I play a single 15/10 rapid game every day (although a recent poll and debate I sparked on Twitter will probably see this change).

“And probably the narrative you have is, well I don’t have time, but you are in fact giving a lot of time to chess. So you probably could find the time to play one [classical] game, or at some point you could go off and play a cool tournament. And then you get five or six [classical] games of something that are quality, where you have spent some time thinking about it. Then you can spend some time looking at them. So that’s number two. Really it’s important that you have your own games. And it’s very important that they are longer games so that you are actually thinking. You're not going to look at a blitz game you played where you are just making quick, intuitive decisions.”

This is a great point. I could make time in the week for one long game, and since my interview with Grandmaster Jesse Kraai I have made some steps in that direction. Although it is not as long a time control as I would like to play, I have joined the Lichess Lonewolf League and am playing one 30+30 game every week in place of one rapid 15/10 game. I do have hope in the future that my weekly ‘serious’ game can be played within the ChessDojo. One of the things I am really excited about is the DojoLiga - the Chess Dojo’s classical tournament that, like the Lichess Lonewolf and 45/45 League, runs in seasons. It has a real classical time control of 90+30 and more importantly, it has games that will be played against other community members. This adds another layer of attraction for me, because of the increased likelihood of getting to properly analyse with someone afterwards.

I want to be a part of that league next season. So here is my ask to you readers: if three of you sign up to my Patreon page at any tier, I’ll be able to join the ChessDojo Training Program and play in the DojoLiga next season. I’ll get a proper classical game in, in a format that will feel high stakes for me. And you’ll get access to my Patreon-exclusive bonuses, like the full audio version of this interview with GM Jesse Kraai, my weekly video update and early access to articles like these.

Structure, Accountability and the Cohort

“Then the third [pillar of the ChessDojo Training Program] is simply what we were talking about before, which is that anybody needs a structure to be held accountable to. So we provide a structure of things to do - a checklist. And then also you’ve got the community and the checklist itself. So you’ve got to go in there and say I am either making progress or I am not. With that kind of structure, it’s really cool that we are trying to build it out too. Instead of it being a thing where like: okay if I learn this opening, maybe I’ll get a couple of wins and that will push me over 1200. It’s like: I am going to build the basis for future growth by learning something significant, and then moving on. Which is kind of a little bit less of an aggressive form of Neal Bruce’s three years of endgames! But you are going to learn some endgames before you move on.”

Shots Fired.

I recounted to Jesse that whilst I was a part of the beta and rejected the suggested reading materials, I did grab hold of one aspect of it - the cohort. The group of people committing to the same training routine as you within your rating band.

“My hope is, that when it really gets going, that people will get to know the people in their cohort because, for example, with the game analysis, it’s a very hard thing to do - to analyse your own games and then to have people who are around your level talk about it, to help you analyse your game. You’ll get to know them there, you’ll get to know them by sparring with them and that would be sparring in openings, sparring in endgames. You’ll get a sense of what their intuitions are. I am a very boring chess player. But every player has to be universal in some sense. So I trained for a long time with GM Josh Friedel, who at that point in his life was a maniac. Every time we would be analysing, he would turn every position into a sac-and-attack position even if it seemed like it was not going to go that way. So any time I am forced into an attack for me being the attacker, I just think: channel Josh, channel Josh, channel Josh. And so you are going to get exposed to these different types of people. And it’s important. It’s important to know what their intuitions are about how to play certain positions. Whereas you, Ono, you are like the taxman. You know? Take a pawn and then live off the dividends!”

Yes, I am exactly like that. And I know that exposure to other chess styles is important for my development. Learning how to play chess like an unhinged radioactive octopus is something I would like to invest a couple of years into, but for now I am following a style I love.

So structure and accountability. Do I need it? Like I said, I have the discipline. I study half an hour to an hour of endgames everyday. I do 20 minutes of tactics everyday. I play one training game everyday. I don’t regularly miss days. And I don’t have anyone but myself keeping me accountable. I know that self-discipline (or possibly chess addiction) when it comes to chess improvement is one of my strengths, but I am also totally aware that not everyone is like this. It helps some people to be held accountable.

So what about structure? Well I stole that off Neal Bruce, but what I learned through my conversation with GM Jesse Kraai was that there is more than one way to bring structure to the knowledge acquisition part of your chess learning.

One element of structure the ChessDojo Training Program provides (that I am clearly missing) is a practical skill-based structure. I’m happy with the way I am learning chess. I’m probably going to stick to endgames for three years and then move onto strategy. But that’s book learning, it’s chess knowledge - it’s not chess skill-building. And you need both.

I expected to gain the practical endgame skills to accompany my endgame knowledge through my training games and Stockfish drills. But this, I now believe, is not enough. Sparring in instructive endgames and middlegame positions is something I could arrange with friends. But if I am honest, even if I could arrange the session, and convince them to do it, I don’t think any of us have the advanced chess knowledge needed to pick the right positions in which to spar. Nor would we have any idea what exactly was meant to be learned or gleaned from playing the position or what concepts or factors were key to the position. In the ChessDojo Training Program, the positions in which I sparred were picked by Masters, and the learning outcomes were clear. I couldn’t do that on my own. On top on that, the ChessDojo Training Program provides a roster of readily available and willing training partners to spar with - and that has value that goes beyond practical convenience. Community.

I am lucky enough to have a couple of chess friends I have met online through the Chesspunks Twitter community who I speak and play with regularly. And that is vital for me in chess, mostly because I do find it such an emotionally challenging pursuit. I need their validation, support and encouragement to continue to do this. I have no doubt that because of the culture in the Dojo and because of the personalities and influence of the Dojo Senseis, that I could’ve equally found that support and community within the ChessDojo Training Program. There were elements of it brewing, and given more time together, I know I could have made friends within my cohort and that I could have built relationships within it to help me on my chess journey. The beta test didn’t last long enough (and I didn’t commit to it enough) to make that a full reality for me, but I know from friends of mine in the ChessDojo Training Program now that those chess friendships are very much there.

For example, without any knowledge of me writing this article, my fellow blogger MatthewKCanada reached out to me to recommend I join the ChessDojo Training Program. What he said was enlightening, particularly how the cohort element of the program helped him to brainstorm solutions to his issues with anxiety and chess - his story serves as a real endorsement of the culture there. Matthew wrote his own article speaking about his experiences as part of the ChessDojo Training Program which I recommend you read.

Conclusion

So is a universal training program like the ChessDojo Training Program for you? I think a lot of that depends on whether or not you enjoy designing your own training regime or not. I personally love to scour the internet for the most effective training methods and tweak them to maximise my time and efficiency. However, I get that this is a niche hobby and for many people handing over total control to a universal training system that is designed to guarantee rating progression is very enticing.

I am too attached to many of my own training methods to turn over my entire training structure to the ChessDojo Training Program. For example, I don’t think anyone can argue that Alex Crompton’s Method is not the most efficient way to improve at fast tactics. Doing mate-in-2’s out of a book, whilst useful, is simply too slow to be as effective in my opinion and puzzle rush also lacks the repetition of that method.

That said, there are many elements within the ChessDojo Training Program, such as the roster of available sparring partners and sparring positions and subsequent human analysis by titled players, which would be much more enjoyable, memorable and possibly more instructive than my current sparring sessions (or daily humiliation as I like to think of it) against my arch nemesis Stockfish. For me, just being able to join the DojoLiga alone would be worth the investment in the ChessDojo Training Program.

On a personal level, I took a lot from my conversation with GM Jesse Kraai. Jesse was the first Grandmaster I have ever spoken to and I took his advice and guidance to heart. I have already started to work longer games into my week schedule and I hope to continue to push my training games in the direction of longer and longer time controls, even if it means less frequent games to make it fit into our family’s week schedule. I also took a lot from having a conversation with someone I would like to be a mentor, my ‘plus’. I realised how much having someone like Jesse to guide my own chess would mean to me, and I hope that one day I can add that relationship to my chess journey.

Want to find a plus for your own chess journey? I do chess coaching now. Read more about the coaching services I offer.

Or book a free 60-minute lesson with me.

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