About me
My name is Vlad Yanovsky, I am a USCF rated national chess master with a rating of over 2200. I am a professional chess teacher who has coached hundreds of students from around the world of all levels from total beginners to experts rated over 2000. I specialize in teaching adult players looking to improve their game, and helping them make extremely quick progress and take their game to the next level.
Who can benefit from my training?
In my experience, the vast majority of adult players striving to improve fall into four main categories. If you fall into any of the following categories, I am absolutely certain that I can help you have make tremendous progress in your game, and take your game to the next level very quickly and efficiently.
Category 1– You have recently taken up chess as a hobby, and are part of the huge new wave of adult chess players to get interested in chess in the last couple of years. You are quite enthusiastic about the game, and have been playing quite a bit on chess.com, as well as occasionally watching some free chess content online. However you have been struggling to break through the 1000 rating plateau on chess.com, and your rating seems to be fluctuating constantly between around 800-950, and you find it very frustrating that you are not able to cross the 1000 barrier, and take your game to the next level.
You are likely to be making very basic mistakes in your thought process and general approach to the game, which I can help you fix immediately. This coupled with some basic tactics training which I will guide you through, and you will make very quick progress, and break through the 1000 rating barrier and beyond within just a couple of lessons, or other forms of training that I offer.
Category 2 – Your rating is between 1000-1400 You have been dedicating a lot of time to the game watching instructional chess content on youtube such as Hikaru, Gotham Chess, and Agadmator, as well as doing various tactics training such as puzzle rush, but have still plateaued at the same rating range for months or even years, despite your best efforts to make progress in your game. As usual, the root of the cause comes down to faulty thought process, and an impractical approach to the game, which I will be able to quickly identify and guide you to fix as efficiently as possible, which will allow you to break through your plateau and break through the 1400 barrier usually within a couple of months.
Category 3 – Your rating is between 1400-1800. This rating range is where it usually starts getting trickier and tougher to improve as an adult. A large percentage of ambitious adult players get stuck for months or even years in this rating range, and are not able to cross the 1600 rating barrier and beyond.At the lower levels it is often enough to just make several key distinctions in your thought process and slightly improve board vision, and that is usually enough to make very quick progress and gain several hundred rating points quickly. However, at this level it typically requires and more disciplined and detailed approach to the analysis of your games to spot more subtle patterns of mistakes and inefficiencies with your thought process and inner dialogue during your games, as well as time management. Tactics training also takes on greater importance at this level, and I will guide you exactly how to train your tactics. Most of my students are able to break through the 1600 barrier within 6 months of training and 1800 within a year depending on your initial level and level of your dedication.
Category 4 – 1800+ I can certainly help you if your an advanced player over the 1800 rating level, and are struggling to make further progress and break the 2000 or even 2200 level. In my experience, less than 5% of all adult players at this level are able to make the jump from 1800-2000 and actually cross the 2000 level and well under 1% are able to break 2200 and make master at an adult age. I was actually fortunate enough to be one of those players and was able to cross the 2200 barrier after the age of 30.
I understand this rating level extremely well, since I was stuck there myself for many years. I know all the hardships and pitfalls that these players face in trying to improve at this level. Our lessons and game analysis will be extremely detail oriented and I will help you identify the specific patterns of mistakes in your thought process at critical junctures of the game. I will also guide you exactly how to train all other aspects of the game on your own. With regular lessons and training, and some serious dedication, I am confident that you will be able to break the 2000-2200 level depending on your initial level.
Why am I so effective in understanding and helping adult players of all levels improve quickly?
I started to play chess at the age of 16, which is extremely late by the standards of most chess masters. I had very little innate talent and started 0/4 in my first two tournaments, and my first official rating was a measly 700.
Most grandmasters and very strong players started playing chess seriously at a very early age, and the chessboard is deeply ingrained in their mind. As a result, they see the board very clearly in their minds eye, which allows them to quickly evaluate the consequences of a move. While this is great for their own game, it actually usually hinders their ability to understand the root of the mistakes of players that start chess late, and therefore they are not very effective in helping them to make quick progress.
When you start playing chess at an adult age, it is practically impossible to imprint the board in your mind’s eyes to the same extent as those that start as kids.
In order to improve my own game and to compensate for this disadvantage, I had to come up with a very practical and efficient method of thinking, which I am able to teach to my students enabling them to make quick improvement to their own game.
I am also able to very quickly diagnose issues in thought process and patterns of mistakes in my students, which is causing them to plateau in their progress. By plugging those weaknesses my students are quickly able to break through there plateau, and make incredibly fast progress in their game that they didn’t think was possible.
My Training Method
My training approach is extremely practical and designed to help people get practical results and improvement in the fastest and most efficient way possible. I specialize in quickly recognizing the issues in my students thought process and general approach, and quickly help the student fix those issues to allow fast progress. By far the best way to do this is through the analysis of the students’ games to find patterns of the types of thought process mistakes the student typically makes.
I also emphasize psychological aspects of the game, and teach students the correct kind of mindset that is needed during their games in order to maximize results, as well as the proper inner dialogue which is crucial for fast progress,
I teach a very practical style of play which is designed to induce mistakes from your opponents, and to learn to quickly identify those mistakes and capitalize on them. I also teach how to minimize your own mistakes and how to make the types of mistakes which your opponents will find extremely difficult to identify and take advantage of.
Time management is also greatly stressed during my lessons. Most adult players prefer to play games with short time controls, and it is absolutely crucial to learn how to manage your time wisely during your games. I do not teach how to find the best move in every position, but how to find decent moves quickly that put pressure on your opponent, and don’t hurt your own position.
Every rating range has a level of resistance that they can handle and if you create problems for your opponent greater than their level of resistance, your opponents will start making mistakes. After that all it comes down to is to quickly recognize and identify those mistakes, and thencapitalizing and converting your advantage. I will teach you exactly how to do this, and once you learn to put those concepts into practice, you will start making extremely fast progress.
Lessons
Private lessons – private lessons are by far the quickest way to make progress for players of all levels. What distinguishes private lessons from all the other trainings that I offer is the opportunity for back and forth communication. We will analyze your games in great detail, and I will ask you many questions along the way about your thought process during your games. Based on your answers I will diagnose exactly what your issues and misconceptions are, and guide you in fixing them, which will allow you to make very quick progress.
Video analysis of your games with your thoughts – This is the closest training there is to the benefits of a private lesson. This will allow me to see exactly what your thought process and inner dialogue is like. Like in private lessons, I will be able to quickly diagnose the issues with your thought process, which are holding you back from rapid improvement.
Video analysis of just your games – Due to my vast experience working with adult players, I almost always have a very good idea of what a player is thinking based solely on his moves. Like other forms of training, I will be able to identify your weaknesses and guide you towards improvement
Training games with video analysis – this is an extremely effective way to improve your game. You will have the opportunity to play a game against me, and see exactly what my thought process was during the game. To maximize the efficiency of our training games, I recommend also recording your own video with your thoughts during our game, and then comparing the differences in our thought processes, which will help you identify exactly where you have deficiencies in your thought process and lead you to rapid growth