A big part of promotion on most courses that get released in chess are two things:
- How long the author spent to work on the course
- How many hours of video the course entails
And as for most things in our world, intuitively, most of us think:
More = better.
“Wow, I get 100 hours of video for just x dollars” is a common way to think about the second metric. I know it from experience. I’ve had several customers saying I should add more hours to my courses to “justify” my price.
Well, I think that’s totally upside down.
Here is why longer courses are very often worse than shorter ones. And because they take up so much of your time, they should be cheaper, not more expensive.
The Only Real Scarcity: Your Time
In basically instant speed you can get information on nearly anything. Just getting more of it is absolutely no problem. The real problem we face nowadays is that we don’t have nearly enough time to dissect and absorb the information we have access to.
As adult chess improvers, I’m sure you feel this issue every single day. Even if you are ambitious and make 1-2 hours a day for serious training, you would never be able to read even only the biggest classics of chess books.
Let alone all the free content, the good to horrible courses and books that try to catch your attention every single day.
So there are two things that really matter nowadays:
- Quality of a resource
- How quickly and simple to understand someone can bring accross a point
A Real World Example
Let’s think about this for your personal life. Imagine you’ve got a problem with your house. Now you get two offers, and for the sake of clarity, you know for a fact both offers will have the exact same outcome. Which one would you pay more for:
- Person A, fixing your problem in 5 Minutes without one drop of sweat
- Person B, working hard for 10 hours, asking you to leave the house because it will be too noisy to stay in
Again, intuitively it might feel strange to pay Person A, who has 1/120th of the work from Person B, the same amount. It feels like a ripoff. But here is the thing.
You shouldn’t only pay Person A the same. You should actually pay them more.
These 10 hours that you have to leave your house have a cost for you. This cost should be reflected in the price you are ready to pay.
Why Is This So Counterintuitive?
What most of us do is to compare the price with the amount of work someone put in. Maybe you are like me and go a step further to calculate an hourly rate for them.
And while paying $1000 dollars for someone working 10 hours ($100/hour) seems okay, paying someone $1000 for 5 Minutes of work just seems egregious.
The problem for anyone (me included) thinking this way is: we are not thinking about the value we get, instead just the work they put in. And very often we’ll realize (too late) that experts spent thousands of hours getting better at their craft so they can provide the same, often even way better, solution in a fraction of the time.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve hired some freelancer for my Chess Business thinking about a “fair” price in relation to the work they’ve put in. Then I had to see how much time they spend not solving my issue, or solving it very badly.
Only then to hire a proper expert who fixed my problems – and the problems created by the previous freelancer – in a fraction of the time.
Back To Chess
For a busy adult improver, the ideal combination is finding someone who gives you just what you need in as short a time frame as possible. The value of my Simplified Chess Improvement System should go up, not down, if I somehow figured out how to teach you everything that is needed in only 1 hour instead of the current 16 hours.
Because at the end of the day, with the abundance of free information, the only point of buying a course, or getting 1:1 lessons, is saving time.
But if that act of buying a course means buying an opening course with 108 hours of video footage – and that is only part 1 out of 3 parts – and just a White repertoire, you might end up paying money for someone to waste so much of your precious time.
More Time Invested = Less Time Taught
Something I have to work on myself a lot is making my writing, teaching and videos as crisp as possible. Not for engagements sake (short form is not my cup of tea), but to make it as valuable as possible.
I don’t mean leaving out important details.
I just mean finding the shortest possible length to bring accross the key teaching.
If I knew a way to write this article in 2 sentences, bring my point accross and make sure you understand it deeply, then this version of the article would be way better.
If there is someone in the chess world with that skill, they should be paid more, not less than me writing several paragraphs more (please direct me to them, I have a lot to learn).
For opening courses that means the more time a true expert Coach puts in their opening course, the shorter the footage should be. Nowadays it is really rather easy to create a Repertoire with the help of Engines and Opening books (at least for a titled player, as we anyway do this for ourselves).
I could start recording today because I have a few repertoires that were on 2700+ level back in 2021 when I retired from chess for myself.
But you know what part of my repertoire took the most time and was the most valuable? My super short and crisp “must-know” files I created with my Coach. That is what true mastery is about. Distilling everything down to the absolute minimum one needs to know.
For people below a level of 1200 chesscom (honestly even higher, but I’m trying to be super sure everyone really is happy), my best try so far got me to a White Repertoire with 107 minutes of footage.
I sometimes use this repertoire with students up to 1900 Lichess and it often works perfectly fine. And again, I do believe I could break it down better and go lower than that.
This repertoire is hidden in my Beginner Chess Mastery course, as a Bonus. I don’t think many people would be interested in buying it as a standalone course (I also am unsure if I want to sell a pure opening course), seeing that there is so little footage. But honestly, if you are below 1200 Online, it is exactly what you need.
For most of us, this isn’t what we see intuitively. Instead we think:
More = Better = More expensive.
I hope you now understand that this is often not the case. But just like me, be prepared to fall for it again in the future, it’s just human.
PS: I know if I invested 10 more hours into this article, I could make it shorter and thus better. But sometimes we need to also ask ourselves how much is good enough. That’s one of the biggest struggles I have: aiming for mastery, but not falling into perfectionism. Work in progress! If you have any tips, let me know.
Keep improving,
GM Noël
PPS: This article was initially sent out to my Newsletter list. If you want to get chess improvement advice for free in your inbox, join 17,000+ chess improvers by signing up for Friday Grandmaster Insights here.
Whenever you’re ready, here is how I can help you:
- Want to know How to train chess well? Check out The Simplified Chess Improvement System. This course taught 800+ students the How of Chess Training. Create your high-quality chess plan and learn how to study each part of Chess, from tactics to openings & endgames. Click here to learn more.
- Rated below 1200 Chess.com? Need to refresh your fundamentals? Check out my course, Beginner Chess Mastery. You’ll learn all the fundamentals, from strategy to how to get the most out of your pieces, tactics, and endgames. You even get a full opening repertoire for free. Click here to learn more.
