LionChess — Chess Coach for Beginners

This is the first of Sandro’s videos that I watched. In it, he gave the three best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard for chess enthusiasts and two tips at the end on implementing them.

These are the three playlists in the order they appear on Sandro’s challenge:

• Patterns — 11 videos
• How to Trade in Chess — 5 videos
• Simplified — 14 videos

Starting with the Simplified series, I did exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do. I watched all of the videos within a few days. They’re very short and very good!

I discovered Candidate Master Sandro, a chess coach who goes by @LionChess _Coach, on Twitter/X when I listened to episode 152 of the Chess Journeys podcast.

Instead of doing easy puzzles that take a few seconds and build your intuition for blitz chess, Coach Sandro recommends working on those that are difficult enough to be barely solvable. This is what you need to improve at classical time controls.

So I put a rule to myself that basically says if I miss what the computer plays as a defense, that’s a failed puzzle.Even if I get it right and I get the rating, I don’t care.In my mind, I failed that puzzle because I…