"A Practical Guide to the Most Fundamental Battle in Chess"
Last year I was invited to join Izyaslav — "Slava," as I know him — as co-author and consultant on his first book.
During our very first meeting on Zoom we spent several hours comparing our experiences as trainers. I have coached at the Chess Bomb club in Plovdiv since 2015, and I was immediately struck by how different his approach was from my own.
I first walked into a chess club in 1982, and I still remember how restrictive our coaches could be. Whenever someone made a mistake, the coach would come straight over to the board, interrupt the game and demonstrate the best move. The Bulgarian school — and, I believe, the Russian school as well — was built on teaching standard patterns from the very beginning. If you wanted a place in the team or a shot at the national championships, you were expected to follow those principles almost to the letter.
Everything was free in those days, but it came with an unwritten obligation: you had to accept the system. You could reject it, of course. You might decide on your own to play the King's Gambit, the Morra Gambit, or even Larsen's 1.b3. That kind of experimenting might even make you the strongest player in the club — but it also made it considerably less likely that you would be picked for the prestigious tournaments.
Many years have passed, and yet most Bulgarian coaches, myself included, still take a demanding line when it comes to building proper chess vision and culture in a student from the very first steps.
Slava's method is quite different. For the first couple of years at least, he avoids imposing a way of playing on his students. He gives them the freedom to find their own path, and offers only a kind of life preserver: guidance on what they should not do — even though they will probably do most of it anyway! — before letting them swim out into the vast and sometimes messy ocean of chess.
Children today learn remarkably quickly that becoming a strong player is not a matter of memorizing rules or patterns. What matters is understanding what is actually happening on the board.
That is the heart of Slava's method: the ability to explain, in very simple language, what is going on in a position. Reading his annotations for the first time, I had the feeling of standing in the middle of a battlefield, watching the pieces fight one another. Another trait of this younger generation is that children are reluctant to accept authority unquestioningly and do not much enjoy being told what to do. In that respect Slava's method is thoroughly practical, and I believe it has the potential to bring many more children into their local clubs.
My own contribution was to make the book interactive by adding the exercises. They are gathered at the end, each one labelled with the chapter it belongs to. Once you have finished a chapter, work through its exercises and see how much has stuck. Depending on how it goes — success or failure — you can decide whether it is worth going back over the chapter or whether it is time to move on.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Slava, and I am proud to be the co-author of a book I consider both genuinely innovative and inspiring.
GM Aleksandar Delchev
Excerpt
