Stoics and Zen masters would be proud of me if they saw my inner peace and the level of stillness I was in. But they would die from laughing if they saw how after a few hours I got so angry, that I threw my phone into the garbage basket. Every...
“In 1959, Floyd Patterson put his title on the line to fight Ingemar Johansson. Although he trained hard for the fight, there was something missing in Patterson’s camp as the day approached. Maybe it was hunger. Maybe it w...
Years ago I was walking with GM Levon Aronian, and he said something interesting: “Mike Tyson was THE Mike Tyson because of his fear. He was afraid of his opponents. And he would use that fear to train very hard, to analyze his opponents v...
They didn’t have any Grandmasters. They didn’t even have an International Master. The average rating of the team was around 2,200 and then there was this 11-year-old kid hanging around. He was about 1,600. It was the Thailand ...
“That’s a brilliant technique! You should write an article on this, Avo.”,- James Altucher, author of the bestseller “Skip the Line,” where he teaches different nice techniques for max speeding learning. And h...
Karpov, Kasparov, Ivanchuk, and Kramnik were playing just ten meters away from me. The 32nd Chess Olympiad was in Yerevan, Armenia. I was seven years old, and with my father, every day, we would go there to watch the games. I remember only one o...
I was pedaling my blue car in our yard as fast as I could.Our neighbour stopped me:“Kid, are you Schumacher? Go slower. There are lots of cars in our yard.” It was something like this, a bit older 😊 I got confused and ran home.&ldq...
How often do you get a winning position, but then you’re unable to win it? When at the end of the game, you’re like, “Ah… I was so close to winning…” Familiar feeling? Well, you’re not alone. Many...
On Feb 15, we turned 6. Six years... Madre mia! To say it was a perfect and smooth journey would be a big lie. We had ups and downs, survived clinical deaths a few times, and had many good and bad days. But every time we went through it, we...
Many of us play online chess or friendly games with our sparring partners. The question is – which time control in chess should you choose? A blitz time format or 60-minute game?With increment or without? Is bullet (1+0) a good time con...
Have you heard this joke? A man goes to a bar and orders a bottle of whiskey. After emptying it, he asks for another one and then one more. After the 3rd bottle, totally drunk, he decides to eat a sandwich. A few minutes later, the man, totall...
"To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people." ~ Charlie Munger I was inspired by this quote and by the book "Poor Charlie's Almanack", to ...
“Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.” — Pema Chödrön A week ago, IM Eric Rosen and I were discussing (the episode comes out soon) the crucial impact of early fans and supporters. While...
"Winners never quit, and quitters never win."Vince Lombardi During my life, I’ve seen so many people who stopped playing chess after their first painful defeat, and till now, over and over again, I hear stories like: “In ...
I have known this guy since my childhood. He’s the world champion and the smartest person in the world. He thinks so. He’s the world champion of arrogance. One day he finally confessed:“I’m not the smartest person anymore...
My investor asked me: “You have about 100 articles on the blog. Why have you never written about chess improvement directly? All your articles are around it, covering a specific topic. But why don’t you have the main article - How to...
Sometimes we play chess at a level much lower than our actual ability.Or we play a tournament, where everything goes so badly that we think all the chess gods are against us.What should one do in these cases? I’ll tell you a story, which c...
I broke my leg a week before Moscow Open, 2012. You know…The combination of snow, mountains, my love for skiing, and my extreme character… I had no chance 😊 So, I traveled to cold Moscow with a cane, and I was like Al Pacino f...
It was 2014 January when I learned one of the most important lessons in my life. The Armenian Championship would start soon. The winner of the tournament would not only become the champion of Armenia but also would be qualified for the nat...
I don’t know. Something didn’t feel right. Something was wrong. Our chess team, consisting of six titled players, had spent six months researching and preparing materials for two new courses. I checked the examples.There were good ...
Recently, my friend, who is a National Master in chess, sent me the following puzzle from the Tactic Ninja course’s quiz: And said he couldn’t solve it.Can you? The reason was clear why he couldn’t. His tacti...
“You can’t fix something unless you admit it.” - Tim Grover There are many reasons why chess players get stuck at their level and stop improving. Today we’re going to speak about one of the main ones – ostrich...
Your chess rating is not equivalent to only your knowledge. It’s equivalent to your knowledge AND performance.And it’s somewhere between when you perform at your worst and at your peak. What if you could always perform at your peak? ...
Memorizing complicated chess variations is a challenge for all levels of players – even for Grandmasters like me. So, what’s the solution?Well, I have 4 pieces of news. Three good 🙂 and one bad 😐 Let’s start with the first piec...
They say, “Heaven on earth is a state, not a place.” In my case, it was both. But then I lost it. And then gained it back… A few days ago, I got a little bit drunk. So I could do it easily.To put every piece of my ...
