Originally published at: A message from Jacob Aagaard - Killer Chess Training
Dear Friends,
The camp with GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko is over and we hope everyone who participated has thouroughly enjoyed it. The games from his sessions will soon be available on Chesstempo for those who had access to the live sessions.
Time has changed this Sunday in Europe, so we remind you once more to check the new schedule of the classes on the website.
Stanislaw has been playing in Hungary. He started as 5th seed and finished on the same rank after 6 rounds. He gained 12 rating points in the process.
Karthik has been playing in France. He finished 2nd in the Anemasse Masters, getting closer and closer to the 2600 mark.
He won a crucial game in the last round, using Sam’s ideas presented in his course for Killer Chess Training – “Thanks to Sam’s finding new ideas in Spanish I kind of won this game”. You can watch his game here.
And finally, a very important message from Jacob:
“Dear students,
The last homework submissions included more cheating than usual. To some extent, we don’t care. The old saying: “it is only yourself you are cheating”, is definitely true when it comes to chess training.
In general, we give the blue ticks, and don’t care. Why should we. You pretend to submit homework, we pretend to mark it. We don’t want to spend more time on cheaters than they spend on the submissions…
Also, we rarely call them out. Why should we? All chess trainers have experienced telling a kid to stop cheating on homework only to end up in 1-2 hours of discussions with parents who think that their kid is probably just exceptionally gifted – or more laughable – believe that it is a off the chart results. Can you not be lucky in chess?
Well, not that lucky. When I was a child, I would steal cookies from my parents. They would hide them. I would find them. I was a smart kid and dedicated. At the end they stopped buying cookies altogether and I never had any. I had not predicted that.
Of course, it is quite absurd when we have a playing position and a 1500 rated player plays better than a Grandmaster and then the server disqualifies them because of rule infringement during the game. In training!
Most of you don’t cheat. We salute you. Getting better at chess is hard and requires commitment. We are here for you and going nowhere. We mostly ignore cheating. Why should we care? But two people were banned from Lichess during out Club Championship, which is really low.
And what are you going to do over the board. Go to the toilet with your phone, get in the newspaper and be known forever on the internet as a cheater? Be smart, or the flow of cookies will stop.
Jacob Aagaard”
Your friends from Killer Chess Training
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