One day in 2020 during our coaching curriculum, I was chatting with my coach and colleague Franck: “Benji, do you know about Ubuntu? You have to watch the Netflix documentary about Doc Rivers”. I was intrigued and checked out “The Playbook”’ – and was amazed by Doc Rivers’ authenticity and charisma. And he explained how […]
Learn about mastery from one of the best sushi chefs in the world I would see ideas in dreams. My mind was bursting with ideas.I would wake up in the middle of the night. In dreams, I would have visions of sushi.Jiro Ono Displays of mastery are powerfully attractive. For better or worse we have […]
“For me, it’s not so important to become world champion. I always wanted to become the best player in the world.” Ding Liren. As the World Chess Championship is over, it is now time to reflect and analyze. One winner, one loses. We always tend to think that the winner must have done things correctly […]
We all want to perform better, let go of an upsetting loss, and overall be more relaxed and focused during our tournaments. This course was designed to specifically help you all throughout the competition. By being more grounded and equanimous you will be able to focus on performing with greater concentration and clarity of thought. […]
Eat your way to up the rating ladder. Grasp the basics of fuelling for chess and what to do on a day of OTB. This photo is of the Rogue esports team. What a splendid display of professionalism. Very few packaged snacks, in-house-made burritos, yoghurts with fresh fruits, and salads with chicken, nuts, and bananas. […]
Unique and valuable take on “How to study chess” in the age of information overload. Full disclosure: Noël graciously gave me a review copy of the course and I agree to do a review of it, and he gave me complete editorial freedom. I give my opinion on the course both with my “adult wannabee […]
This post was originally published on my lichess blog on 2022-09-19. Here it is on the website for sake of housekeeping. Enjoy! How to think about performance and organise teams and individual environments. How high-performance environments are built in traditional sports Damien Comolli is the Director of Football at Toulouse FC. Before this, he helped […]
Musings and reflections on two modern models of Mental Toughness. What is mental toughness? Intuitively we know the great champions are mentally tough (Magnus is much more likely to win after a loss as Nate calculated) and players that faced adversity and collapsed aren’t. Mentally tough people achieve their challenging goals consistently when confronted with […]
If you’re going through hell, keep going. Churchill As chess players, we get tired as we play long games, and are more likely to make mistakes when tired. What is fatigue? How to slow down the onset of fatigue? Let’s have a look at the bio-psycho-social model of endurance performance. Bio-psycho-what? How we act when […]
“I’m not worried about Daryl Morey. He’s one of those idiots who believe in analytics” Charles Barkley Maximising score Team chess is fun – you get to play with your friends and team-mates and compete together and also one of the highest competitive forms of chess: the Olympiad is played every two years between countries […]