Most people aren’t ready for real chess improvement. What they chase is quick dopamine in the form of easy progress.
The good news is that this allows you to outperform 90% of players if you just do the work:
- Do what matters
- Do it well
- Do it consistently
But there is a downside to being part of the 10% that actually wants real chess improvement: nearly all the content, courses, and advice out there are not for you.
Mainstream Is For The Lazy
When a channel or course, or book gets mainstream, you can nearly count on it not being for you.
Why? Because if it is mainstream, a lot of people like and consume it. As we know, 90% of players aren’t ready to do the hard work. So whatever these 90% consume, it likely isn’t what truly builds your skills and helps you improve.
If you are an expert in any field, you will have noticed this trend:
- Netflix is for the masses. If you are a true film lover, you probably get a headache from most of the quickly produced movies.
- General pop music often has lyrics that are either super basic (and always the same) or don’t make any sense at all. They also all sound pretty similar.
- Fast Food is engineered for the masses. It is designed to be cheap, fast, and give you a quick dopamine hit. But it has almost zero nutritional value. If you want to build the body of a serious athlete, you can’t fuel yourself with McDonald’s.
I chose these three examples because we all consume them. Sometimes, after a long day, I also just want to watch a simple Netflix show or grab a quick burger. In those areas, I am part of the mainstream audience (even though I often feel like I would be happier without these things).
There is nothing inherently wrong with mainstream things when you just want to relax and be entertained. But when you want to build character, do the right thing and truly improve a skill, mainstream isn’t good for you.
Packaging Is King
What I’ve realized myself since making YouTube videos is that the packaging of ideas is so much more important than the actual content if you want to get huge numbers. YouTube only cares if people stay longer on the platform, not if you improve your chess.
For most important chess improvement topics, the most viewed videos are filled with huge promises but only touch the surface. Often, I get the feeling the YouTuber spent 5 minutes thinking about what they just taught, while working hours on the thumbnail and title to sell you the “illusion of improvement.”
As a true expert, the answer is often not so straightforward that you can pack it into a 1-minute TikTok video. Going deeper inevitably loses many viewers, because they are only interested in a quick solution, not the boring truth.
So that means the deeply thought-through work, the good chess improvement advice, is often hidden in smaller channels and less common courses.
The small exception is books. These take so long to write that the author usually has serious intentions and actually has something valuable to say before starting such a humongous project.
The Best Chess Example: The Step Method
I highly recommend this boring book series (read my full article about it here) because the quality of it is great. But have you ever heard one of the mainstream YouTubers talk about it?
Not to my knowledge.
That’s because these workbooks are not sexy at all. And their homepage looks like someone made it 20 years ago and never updated it. You can’t make a viral video about it, calling it “The Best Chess Resource,” and sell it as a magic pill that instantly improves your game. It requires sitting down, thinking, and doing the hard work.
So, What Resources Are For You?
If you want real chess improvement, want to stop wasting your time, and want to get the most out of your limited study hours, you have to be very picky. This isn’t a perfect guide, but here are a few rules of thumb for you:
- Avoid mainstream YouTube channels. They are trading instructional quality for reach and entertainment.
- Be careful with Chess.com content. Especially since the investments from private equity in 2022, their content pushes gamification and tries to squeeze as much money as possible out of you through quick fixes. Keep in mind, Chess.com products also include Chessable, Aimchess, and a few other sites.
- Prioritize books over digital products. Books are often higher quality because they take so much effort to write. Quality Chess books, for example, are great for serious FIDE-rated players.
- Books turned into courses > courses turned into books. A great book that got adapted into a Chessable course is usually a safe bet. A video course that was just rushed into a book format? Not so much.
- Invest in paid products. If you can afford it, nearly exclusively consuming paid products is the best thing for your chess. You just avoid so much of the free internet BS. A good book can last a few weeks or months, so it doesn’t even have to be expensive.
- Less is more. When you have good resources, you don’t need a lot of them. In The Simplified Chess Improvement System, I recommend two all-in-one approaches, one for video courses, one for Books. That’s it.
- Don’t ruin a good plan with bad add-ons. This is a huge trap I see students fall into. They have a great, simple training plan, but then they think: “Oh, I have an extra 15 minutes, let me just watch this random YouTube video.” Don’t do it. Mixing a high-quality plan with confusing, mainstream resources doesn’t give you “extra” improvement. It just ruins your focus, complicates things, and overwhelms you.
- Beginner specific tip. If you are below 1500 on Chesscom, you literally only need one single course for your knowledge. The real work will just be gaining the necessary skills through tactics training, playing, and analyzing.
And The Most Important Thing
Once you get good resources, don’t just consume them. Work with them. Challenge yourself. Use your own brain. Do the hard work.
You build skill through execution and a lot of mistakes. Not by watching someone else do the hard thing. That’s consuming and is not real chess training.
Keep improving,
GM Noël Studer
PS: 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.
