Igor Smirnov
I started to play chess at the age 8. After a year of training, I attained the First category and became champion of Sevastopol (my native town) among schoolboys. I enjoyed the game and my rating increased quite quickly. At the age 13 after winning several international tournaments, I achieved the title of International Master.
Then I started to play mainly in the adult tournaments and realised that it wasn't so simple to win there. I trained hard for about 6-8 hours a day, had many coaches and read a lot of chess books. But then it came to me that a lot of new information wasn't making my game stronger!
The coaches offered me loads of different training systems, but they didn't know the answer to this simple question. "How to make real progress and start to play chess better?" No one said to me: "I know exactly what to do and I can guarantee your progress."
From that time onward, I began to think about the right way of training and improving myself. That's why I took an interest in psychology: it explains how the human brain works. After understanding some principles of a human's thinking process, I grasped why the usual way of training is so ineffective.
Combining my chess experience and psychological knowledge, I started to create my own system of chess education. My chess results then became much better – I increased my rating to 2505, and at the young age of 20 became an International Grandmaster. My chess educational system corroborated its effectiveness in practice!
I was very happy that after a long period of hard work, everyday training and huge efforts, I had learnt the right way to train. Based on my experiences, I've decided to share this important knowledge and skills with other people, who want to get better in their own chess development. I believe it will help other people to save the significant time and a lot of expenditure on futile efforts, and enjoy fast progress.
I have now obtained a Master's degree in psychology and made some more improvements in my chess educational system.
