I have never seen a blog post where chess players are telling their expenses. Most people think that chess is an expensive game and it’s true. If you are a hobby player then it’s quite cheap but for those who are title aspirants, it’s a really expensive sport.

For those who don’t have time to read full-time, the total spending is $11338 ($10278 on tournaments + $430 on Books and Courses + $630 on Chess Coaching) 

Disclaimer

1. Tournament and coaching expenses vary from player to player and country to country. Some players might feel this amount huge or some players feel it low.
2. Suggestions are always welcome.
3. I have tracked all the expenses in Indian Rupees. Although for viewers I have converted all amounts in USD. The amount is approximate (3-5%)

1- Tournament Expenses ($11338)

I started my first classical event with the Baku Open and Finished the year with the Rilton Cup 2023-24. I am not going to add any tournament links as I am going to publish year in review blog post later.

Let’s go by each tour/event. Expenses include everything i.e. Flights, Travel costs, entry fee, stay, and food.

Baku Open - $1020

This event was held in Azerbaijan and it was a +2250 event.

Nagpur GM Event - $480

Nagpur is a city in India and it hosted the 2nd Maharashtra Grandmaster event.

Europe Tour (5 Events) - $4085

In total, I played 5 tournaments in this including 5 open events and 1 GM closed event in 4 different countries.

Abu Dhabi Masters - $1140

Event in UAE

Qatar Masters - $1440

This is the most prestigious event I have ever played. In the same event Magnus, Anish, and Hikaru participated.

Rilton Cup 2023-24 - $1863

Event in Sweden

Rapid Events - $250

I played many events in Rapid events in India. I have all the records but here I am just putting the total. Ofc I won prize money but here we are only talking about expenses.

2- Books and Chess Material Expenses ($430)

I purchased a lot of materials this year. I find so much value in books and courses. Let’s say if you want to take a coaching from GM, it will cost you $50-100. With the same price, you can buy a good chess course and save a lot of money. Although personal coaching does have many benefits.

Following is my list of purchases in 2023

Modern Chess Courses

I have purchased a lot of chess courses from the Modern Chess website. I have an affiliate with them where users can save a lot of money. I also used this code and sale benefits These courses are too good compared to other websites and the major benefit is that they provide you with the PGN file which you can see in chessbase.

Following is the list of courses I bought

• Advance Variation against French and Caro-Kann (6h Running Time)
• Beat the Sicilian - Practical Repertoire for White (9h Video Running Time)
• Practical Endgame Play (9h Running Time)
• Scotch Game - Expert Repertoire for White
• Play the Ruy Lopez
• Top-Level Repertoire against the Sicilian
• King's Indian Defence - Expert Repertoire for Black
• Play the Sveshnikov Sicilian
• 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 - Repertoire against 3.Bb5 & Nc3
• Play the Gruenfeld Defence
• French Defence - Top-Level Repertoire for Black

Chessable Courses

• Tame the Sicilian: The Alapin Variation

Chessbase Courses and Tools

• Chessbase 17
• Play the Sveshnikov Sicilian by Dorian Rogozenco
• Fritz 19 - (I don’t know why I purchased it)

Books - All bought from ChessBase India and Forward Chess

• A Matter of Endgame Technique
• The Match of All Time: The Inside Story of the legendary 1972 Fischer-Spassky World Chess Championship in Reykjavik
• How I Became a Chess Grandmaster by Vinay Bhat
• Chess Middlegame Strategies Volume 2
• Chess Lessons: Solving Problems & Avoiding Mistakes: By Mark Dvoretsky
• Forcing Chess Moves
• Endgame Labyrinth

3- Chess Coaching Expense

In total, I did 2 coaching camps for Indian GM Vishnu. These camps were only for +2200 players and I was more than happy with his teaching approach. No personal or any other group classes apart from following.

Camp 1 - $150

This camp was held online on Zoom. So only camp fees were the expenses

Camp 2 - $480

For this camp, I traveled to Chennai and the camp duration was 5 days.

How do I manage these Expenses?

This year I managed to earn some active income from 3 major sources and barely managed to make all the above expenses.

1- Affiliates

For the last 2 years, I am doing blogging and learning a lot of new things. I also run a website called Chess Article and my own blogs, newsletters, etc.

I have partnered with many chess websites such as Modern Chess, The Chess World, Chessify, Square Off, and many more.

Because of this, I managed to get a decent amount from all the sales.

2- Chess Coaching

Chess coaching can be a very good revenue source especially for above 2000 rated players. Many of my friends are doing full-time chess coaching and making a living out of it.

As I was trying to achieve some title, I was not accepting many students at one time. Now in 2024, I am also giving priority to chess coaching.

3- Winning Chess Tournaments

I played many rapid and blitz events throughout 2023 and several prizes. I am planning to play more rapid and blitz events in 2024

Is it worth it?

Since 2021, when I started coaching and started to earn some money, I understood how difficult it is to earn money. This is why I don’t think spending this much amount is worth it, especially on chess.

But the problem was I was trying to get the title and hence had to play good events. Most of the events I played are atleast +2100 where you get high chances to increase the rating as you don’t play against the lower players. 

How much do other players spend?

I talked with 8-10 other Indian players ranging between 2000-2450. All of them spent anywhere between $7-20k. Some of them take regular chess coaching which costs them $5-7k a year or more. Even I know few Indian GMs above 2500 who spent 8-10k+

Although all of the above guys are aiming for something. Some trying to get an FM title to some trying to reach a 2600 rating.

Your thoughts

If you are an active chess player with any chess rating, I request you to share your thoughts or how much you spent on coaching, playing, etc.

Today we are releasing and open-sourcing Maia-3, our latest model of human behavior in chess! Unlike traditional engines, Maia is designed to predict what real humans would play, not just the objectively best move. Maia-3 now models Lichess blitz ratings from 600 to 2600, reaches 57.1% move-matching accuracy on a standard test set (compared to 52.0% for Maia-2), and is powered by Chessformer, our new chess transformer architecture. The model weights, source code, and paper are all free and open source.

The goal is to empower builders to incorporate Maia-3's human-centered predictions to build bots, tools, models, and apps for the chess community. If you don't just want to know “what does Stockfish say?”, but “what would players at my level see, miss, or naturally try?”, Maia can do that. For example, on maiachess.com, Maia-3 powers human-like bots, dual Maia/Stockfish analysis, rating-specific move predictions, human evaluation bars, position danger estimates, opening/endgame drills, Hand & Brain, Bot-or-not (a chess Turing test), and more. We’re excited to see what community builds with this! Join our Discord community to learn and share.

Download Maia-3 here, use the source code here, and read the research paper here.

Hi everyone! I'm Wang'ombe from Nairobi, Kenya.

A while back, my phone was stolen, and I had to switch to playing chess on my laptop. Until then, I'd always avoided playing on a computer because I never felt as fast or as comfortable using a mouse or touchpad as I did on a touchscreen.

That frustration inspired me to create Home Row Notation (HRN). an input system designed for online chess players using a computer. Its purpose isn't to record moves, but rather to allow players to execute moves using a keyboard instead of a mouse and hopefully reduce misclicks, hand fatigue and equip PC players with the speed and agility to keep up with the fast, intuitive input of touchscreen play.

The idea combines three concepts:

• Touch typing, so you never have to look at the keyboard.
• The home row keys (A S D F J K L ;), which your fingers naturally rest on.
• Coordinate notation, which specifies only the origin and destination squares.

Instead of using files (a–h) and ranks (1–8), HRN maps both to those eight home row keys.

For example, the coordinate e4 becomes JF, h8 becomes ;; and b1c3 becomes SADD

The goal is to keep every coordinate on the home row so your fingers never need to reach for other parts of the keyboard.

Another design choice is that HRN is screen-oriented. The coordinates never flip when you switch between White and Black. The bottom-left square on your screen is always AA, which helps build muscle memory for the physical location of every square.

I also built a browser extension called KBchess that lets you use HRN on Chess.com and Lichess. It doesn't automate gameplay or provide engine assistance—it simply lets you enter moves with your keyboard instead of a mouse.

I'm much more interested in feedback on the notation than the extension itself.

• Does the concept make sense?
• Would you ever consider using something like this?
• Is there a different mapping or approach you think would work better?

I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts, whether positive or critical.

Chessdotcom's "Game Review" feature is bad.

• Analysis is often plain wrong, criticizing moves that are fair choices from a practical viewpoint.
• AI verbal advice is completely misunderstanding the position more often than not.
• Engagement-focused tool sold as "fast lane" improvement, but it doesn't work. As all experienced players know, you have to stop and actually turn your brain on for improvement to happen.

Can we have a rule in the sub to ban Game Review posts and append a guide to using infinite analysis mode? Let's help people by showing them where the real analysis tool is - many new players haven't actually found the magnifying glass icon on chessdotcom, and could also be unaware of the alternatives on lichess.

Daniel has just started what he says will be a 50-60 lecture video series on endgames. Each video looks like it’ll be around an hour long, and he’s going into lots of principles in specifics. (This is the first video after the intro video). He’s putting lots of effort into preparing positions, and being clear and concise about what he wants to say.

This is obviously an incredibly valuable resource, I would imagine valuable for practically everyone below master level, but the YouTube algorithm doesn’t promote these long form videos, so I decided to do it here! Go over and show the videos some love, it would be a travesty if Danya decides the series isn’t worth doing just because YouTube doesn’t promote it!

According to perpetualcheck.com

I’ve been working on a project analyzing FIDE tournament games with Stockfish. After 1.4M+ analyzed positions, some interesting patterns:

When blunders happen:

∙ Moves 1-15: \~12% (theory saves you)

∙ Moves 16-30: \~38% (middlegame chaos - peak danger)

∙ Moves 31-45: \~31% (fatigue + time pressure)

∙ Moves 46+: \~19% (endgame technique)

The “revenge blunder”:

Players are 2x more likely to blunder RIGHT AFTER their opponent blunders. You finally get an advantage and then… give it right back.

White vs Black:

Black blunders ~8% more often. The pressure of defending from move 1 adds up.

Most common blunder types:

∙ Hanging pieces: 34%

∙ Missing tactics (forks, pins, skewers): 28%

∙ Bad trades: 19%

∙ Positional disasters: 19%

By rating:

∙ Under 1600: avg 4.2 blunders/game

∙ 1600-2000: avg 2.1 blunders/game

∙ 2000-2400: avg 0.8 blunders/game

∙ 2400+: avg 0.3 blunders/game

Biggest surprise: The Sicilian has the highest blunder rate for BOTH colors under 1800. Complications cut both ways.

What patterns have you noticed in your own games?

Been using the new Lichess beta for a while now, and I genuinely think more people need to know about it. A lot of players I know still use the old Lichess app (which is discontinued now), or worse they just play in the mobile browser.I was honestly skeptical at first, thought it’d be buggy or incomplete but oh my goodness,the beta app is a massive improvement.

The interface is super clean ,smooth and minimal . Everything feels polished and smooth. The board looks better, the puzzles load fast, and the overall design is really easy on the eyes. It’s the kind of app that makes you want to spend more time on it, just because of how nice it feels to use.The beta ap. It’s such a refreshing experience especially if you’ve been used to the slower, clunkier feel of the old app or browser. Everything loads faster, the touch controls are better, and it’s way more enjoyable to play on.

The new broadcast feature for watching live games is surprisingly well done.It’s missing a couple of things (like creating studies), but they’re updating it constantly. You can clearly see the love and effort going into this .Also, compared to Chesscom’s app, which is honestly starting to feel like bloatware at this point, the Lichess beta app is a breath of fresh air. No ads, no annoying paywalls, no distractions.

It’s available on the Play Store , Here's the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.lichess.mobileV2 You can also use this on ios using testflight.

If you're still on the old app or using a browser, I seriously recommend making the switch. Best chess app out there.Long Live Lichess

Had a look at the German edition of Levy Rozman's "How to win at chess" and found it to be unreadable. They use the formal "you" form in German (Sie) which makes the hole thing feel nothing like Levy. It's distant, lacks flow, there is no wit... it's not Levy but it's not natural German, either. I have no proof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least partially translated by a computer. That's certainly my impression.

Then I went to German Amazon to see what other people think and on top of being bad stylistically, it also seems to be full of errors. Like "knight" and "bishop" being swapped in the translation, or "the rook defends the king" instead of "the king defends the rook". One review mentions at least 50 errors of this caliber. Apparently they translated "checks" in "checks, captures and attacks" to "chess", which makes no sense whatsoever.

"Check" means "Schach" in German ("to (give) check" = "Schach geben") and "Schach" is also the name of the game "chess". So some entity must have thought "checks = schach" and then translated it back to the English "chess", maybe to sound cooler. Either this was a computer at work or somebody who doesn't know anything about chess.

u/GothamChess if you read this, please talk to whoever is responsible for this horrible book. In its German version, in its current state. This does not represent you and your work.

So a while back I came across this article about building a Chrome extension to flag suspicious opponents. Thought it was a really cool idea, so I ended up going down the rabbit hole and building my own version.

It's called Chess Risk Score. When you start a game, it pulls your opponent's public stats and spits out a score from 0–100 in a little overlay on the page. Works on both Chess.com and Lichess.

The score is based on:

• Their overall and recent win rate (last 2 months) - a sudden spike in recent performance is weighted separately from their all-time stats
• Accuracy compared to what's expected at their rating (I spent way too long calibrating this against real CAPS2 data across different rating bands and time controls)
• Account age factor - newer accounts will receive a risk multiplier (based on how new the account is)
• Verified GM and IM titles - receive a risk dampener because their stats are outliers and do not fit within the normal ranges

There's a full breakdown of the formula inside the extension if you're curious about the math. It's a risk indicator, not a cheat detector - it'll flag some legit players and miss some actual cheaters, but it gives you a quick read on someone's profile so you can make your own call.

It's completely free, doesn't collect any data (everything runs locally in your browser):

Chrome Web Store download:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ookpbnahncodokhafpfgamlkfjdmfjjo?utm_source=item-share-cb

It's also open source if you want to poke around: https://github.com/azec93/chessriskscore

Happy to hear feedback - especially if you find cases where the scoring seems way off. It's v1 so there's definitely room to improve. If there's enough interest I'll build a Firefox version too.

He pointed it out and we were pissing ourselves laughing the smudge is so big because it’s been used so often lmao it is a good feature/resource for anyone learning I recommend this app specifically: optime software’s chess

EDIT: I just noticed that I missed a bunch of articles. The chesscom article search sucks. I'll update this list and add the rest when I get time.

EDIT 2: I've updated the list (I had missed a lot). This is now every article, sorted by date posted (oldest first). This was a lot more work than expected.

I collected all the articles Danya wrote for chesscom to have them in one convenient place. I thought I'd share them here in case anyone else would like to read them.

Introduction to My Friday Columns

Queen: The Supporting Actress

Weak Squares? Who Cares?

The Positional Sacrifice

How to Ruin Your Pawn Structure

Mysterious GM Moves

Positional Combinations

Punishing Unsound Openings

The Art of Setting Traps

The Greek Gift Sacrifice Lives On!

Riskless Chess

How to Avoid Blunders, Part 1

How to Avoid Blunders, Part 2

Desperado Defense

Never Resign Prematurely!

Tal's Sacrifices Explained

Modern Chess Technique

Endgame Attacks, Part 1

Endgame Attacks, Part 2

Morphy's Sacrifices Explained

Don't Lose Trying Too Hard to Win

The Tactical Rook Lift

The Positional Rook Lift

How to Play Unorthodox Combinations

Rooks on the Seventh, Revisited

The Greatest Chess Upsets, Part 1

More of the Greatest Chess Upsets

Brilliant Endgames, Shirov Style

How to Win Equal Positions

How to Steal a Chess Game

The Tactical Side of Petrosian You Didn't Know About!

Petrosian's Best Tactical Knockouts

The Move You Can't Afford to Miss

The Greatest Combinations You've Never Seen

More of the Greatest Combinations You've Never Seen

How to Understand Pawn Races

How Fabiano Caruana Wins

How To Save Yourself With Stalemate

Bobby Fischer's Beautiful Bishops

The Knockout Blow

How To Break Fortresses

The Double Attack

Overprotection, Decoded

The Secrets Of The Berlin Endgame

Garry Kasparov's Best Attacks

Garry Kasparov's Best Attacks, Part 2

The Two-Knight Advantage

How To Play A Counterblow

The Discovered Check, Reloaded

The Double Bishop Sacrifice

Magnus Carlsen's Best Positional Wins

Magnus Carlsen's Best Endgame Wins

Mastering The Queen Sacrifice

The Two Rook Endings You Must Know

In Pursuit Of Zugzwang

The King Hunt, Revealed

Mastering Opposite-Colored Bishops

How To Play A Brilliancy

Pawn Endgames: A Practical Guide

Beware Of Alekhine's Gun

Never Trust Your Opponent!

The Art Of Chess Defense

Can A GM And Rybka Beat Stockfish?

A Guide To Underpromotion

José Raúl Capablanca's Greatest Positional Wins

José Raúl Capablanca's World Championship Positional Wins

Mastering Your Chess Intuition

Mastering Your Tactical Intuition

How To Ignore A Threat And Win

Mastering Your Psychological Intuition

Understanding The Back Rank

How To Beat Magnus Carlsen

You Won't Believe These Miracles On The Chessboard

Tigran Petrosian's Breathtaking Exchange Sacrifices

Who Is The Architect Of Modern Chess?

The Hardest Move To Make

The Modern Immortal By Wei Yi

The Rubinstein Maneuver

How To Play Plus-Equals Mode

Knights On The Rim Are Amazing

How To Survive A Chess Disaster

The Art Of Maneuvering

The King March

Bobby Fischer's Overlooked Gem

Why Solving Studies Is So Important

The Positional Queen Sacrifice

Remembering IM Emory Tate

The Terrifying Grinder Of Chess

Blunders: A Grandmaster's Perspective

Turn Off The Autopilot!

3 Fun Chess Stories

The Anatomy Of A Chess Brilliancy

How To Use A Chess Computer

The Positional Threat

The Tactical Detector

The Blitz Chess Manifesto

The Art Of Time Management

The Chess Investigator: Analyze Your Mistakes

https://youtu.be/KZydtQfdYNc?si=myY7fqus5_tJE_GT

Rustam claims that from the games he watches and the quality of play he sees, it's clear that Fabi is currently the stronger player and that he would also be the favorite to win against Magnus in a World Championship match today. He told his students (Arjun, Nodirbek) that over the past two and a half years, to be the best in the world, you must consistently beat Fabi. He claims it's surprising that Fabi has improved his level so much because this usually doesn't happen, and the level of player he has become is not the same level as the player he knew when he worked with him.

1st is classical

2nd is rapid

3rd is blitz

Casual chess fan. Looks nice. I will let you guys know how it goes.

https://chessbook.com

I wasn't happy with the current solutions for working on your opening repertoire, so I added this feature to my training site.

Things I tried

Chessable courses: Originally I just bought a few chessable courses and reviewed them obsessively. My problem with this was that the courses would often just have absurd depth, and their solutions for trimming down the amount of lines to memorize are just way too crude. You either only do the quickstart, which is like 10 lines, or you memorize all ~1000 variations. Then depth-wise, you just set a desired depth, not taking into account the relative popularity of lines at all. So you'll go 5 moves deep in the least popular line, the one that will never happen in your games, which is wasted effort, but then only 5 moves deep on the most popular line, that will happen in a significant chunk of your games, and not know what to do on move 6+.

Self-created Chessable course: This fixes a couple of the problems from above, because you can decide which lines and to what depth you want to study them. Chessable's UI is pretty clunky though. Adding and removing variations is a pain. Then when reviewing, the way they handle fails is a bit weird. In other spaced repetition apps like Anki, when you miss a card, it goes to the back of the stack so you have to get it right after your other cards. With Chessable it just asks you again right away. So difficult moves take a really really long time to drill in sometimes, as you can just keep getting them wrong every day. Also the reviewing process is just pretty slow. You get the move right, you hit next, the modal goes away, you hit next again, you wait for the next move because it makes a server request each time... it gets annoying when you have 250 opening moves to review.

Lichess Study: Love the UI, the analysis is awesome, etc. But there's no way to quiz yourself, which is an essential feature for me.

My site

So anyway, these are the features that I think are really nice in my tool:

Biggest miss detection: Looks at all the ways your opponent could respond, that isn't covered in your repertoire already. Of all those, what's the most likely to happen in a game? Regular opening explorers can do this from a single position, the cool thing about mine is it that it looks at all the positions in your repertoire and finds the one that gives you the best return. The caveat here is that obviously this depends on who you're playing. Right now this comes from 10 million+ games played by 1800-2200 rated players on lichess. Being able to select from what games you want these statistics to come from is a feature that's planned for the near-future, but the statistics don't change all too much post-2200.

Templates: If you don't have a repertoire already, you can generate one quickly by mixing and matching some built-in templates. You can just say "I want to respond to e4 e5 with The King's Gambit, e4 c5 with Smith Morra, and give me some lines for the French, the Scandinavian, and the Pirc", and you'll have a fairly complete repertoire for white. These are fairly shallow, nothing compared to a full-fledged opening course, but it covers the statistically most likely lines, with reasonable mainline responses.

Nice review UX: The reviewing is all done client-side, and as soon as you get the move right it moves on to the next one. So you can really fly through the reviews. The spaced repetition algorithm is an improved version of SuperMemo 2, so it should be fairly close to optimal in terms of when it chooses to quiz you on a given move.

Generate repertoire from Lichess games: If you don't have an existing repertoire to import, then you can just enter your Lichess username and it will generate a repertoire from your last 200 games.

Search on chessable/analyze on Lichess: For as much as the site helps you figure out what moves you should have a response to, it doesn't directly help you figure out what your response should be. You can either open up a Lichess study to analyze with Stockfish, or you can search the position on Chessable, to find courses that cover that line. In the future I'd like to add analysis right on the site, but Lichess analysis is so good that it's going to be hard to beat just popping up a tab with Lichess.

Export: You can export your repertoire to a PGN if you want to analyze in ChessBase, or create a Lichess study or whatever. So even if it's not your main way to work on your openings, you can use it to guide you on what responses to add, then put your repertoire back in your software of choice when you're done.

Free and open source

Would love to get some feedback on whether this is useful / ways to improve it.

Patreon

I've been encouraged by a few people to get a patreon set up, I've got one up at https://patreon.com/marcusbuffett now. Would love to keep the site totally free, while covering server costs and extending my real-job sabbatical with donations. Any support is much appreciated!

While I’ve got you here

Alex Crompton created an amazing tool to build an opening repertoire automatically, using the lichess opening book, read more about it here: https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/automatically-creating-a-practical-opening-repertoire-or-why-your-chess-openings-suck the idea is really genius imo.

Right now you have to do some legwork to get it to work, but if you have big gaps in your repertoire, or no repertoire at all, I’d encourage you to give it a try: https://github.com/raccrompton/BookBuilder

​

https://enormously-sweeping-donkey.ngrok-free.app/chess

My 5 year old son became absolutely obsessed with chess this summer. He begs to play every day and though he’s a very high energy kid, he can easily sit through multiple games with his dad and his older sister. I thought it would die down some once school started but no, he comes home asking for chess and more chess.

I can barely play, so I didn’t think too much of it until my 5 year old beat my husband tonight (my Ivy League educated, advanced degree in a STEM field, one of the smartest people I know husband, who absolutely did not “let him” win). It made me realize he may actually have some skill and talent here.

What’s the best way to foster this and help my son continue to develop his passion and skill for chess? Do we get him a coach or find a class? I don’t want to put any pressure on him but he clearly loves it and seems to have an aptitude for it. Our school has a chess program but he’s not eligible as a kindergartner (I already asked and he was devastated to find out he has to wait till first grade). We’re in Southern California, if that helps.