GM Swapnil Dhopade’s February Tactical Thursday course focuses on one of the most underdeveloped skills in practical chess: defensive thinking and resourcefulness under pressure.
While most players associate calculation with attacking play—forcing sequences, combinations, and material gains—this course shifts the perspective to the other side of the struggle. It examines how strong players think when they are worse, under attack, or facing difficult decisions with limited time.
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6h PGN Download Interactive Tests
GM Swapnil Dhopade’s December Tactical Thursday course focuses on a highly practical and often underestimated aspect of chess improvement: calculation in the endgame.
Many players approach the endgame primarily as a theoretical phase. However, a central idea of this course is that a large number of endgames can be played almost entirely on calculation. Strong practical players frequently win endgames not because they know more theory, but because they calculate more accurately.
The course shifts the focus from memorizing positions to understanding how to calculate in simplified structures, where every tempo and every decision carries significant weight.
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6h PGN Download Interactive Tests
For over a century, the French Defense has captivated chess players worldwide. Yet understanding it—truly understanding it—requires more than memorizing engine evaluations. GM Pier Luigi Basso's Understand the French series takes a different approach: studying the games of history's greatest French specialists to reveal the strategic ideas, plans, and philosophy behind their play.
Sequence: 1.e4 Structures »
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3h 10m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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Doubled pawns appear in countless openings, yet most players never develop a consistent way to handle them. Most handle them by feel rather than by principle, which rarely holds up under pressure.
GM Ioannis Papaioannou built his latest course around exactly this problem. From the Opening to the Middlegame: Positions with Doubled Pawns is not a theoretical overview of doubled-pawn structures. It is a training system for developing structural judgment — the kind of understanding that replaces rules of thumb with genuine positional reasoning.
Sequence: Fundamental Pawn Structures »
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There is a persistent gap in chess improvement literature between what engines show and what players actually need to understand. The best move in a position and the right way to think about that position are often completely different things. This gap — between engine output and human decision-making — is precisely what GM Ioannis Papaioannou has been building a methodology to close, one edition at a time.
Inside Your Games – Edition 3 is not a course about perfect moves. It is a course about real thinking, in real games, under real conditions.
As GM Ioannis Papaioannou explains, the goal of this project is simple but rare: to show how a strong player evaluates positions, forms plans, and makes decisions — not how a chess engine assigns numbers to moves.
Sequence: Inside Your Games »
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3h 55m
There is a recurring problem with how the French Defence is often taught: players memorize lines without ever developing a genuine feel for the structures. GM Pier Luigi Basso takes a fundamentally different approach in Understand the French Defence – Rubinstein's Legacy, the opening volume of a new multi-part series on Modern Chess. Instead of cataloguing engine-approved variations, the course asks a deeper question: what did the greatest French specialists in history actually understand, and how can their games reveal the opening's strategic core for us today?
The answer to that question begins, naturally, with Akiba Rubinstein.
Sequence: 1.e4 Structures »
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There is an old saying among French Defense devotees: the real game begins once the theory stops. Unlike many sharp openings where preparation decides the outcome, the French rewards — and punishes — understanding. A player who has memorized 20 moves of the Advance Variation but cannot explain why White's e5-pawn is both a strength and a vulnerability will eventually be outplayed by someone who has studied the structure itself. This is precisely the insight behind Understanding the French Defense, a new course by GM Davorin Kuljasevic published on Modern Chess.
Sequence: Universal Pawn Structures »
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Few structures in chess generate such radically different plans for both sides as the doubled c-pawns arising from the Nimzo-Indian Defense. White accepts a compromised pawn formation in exchange for the bishop pair, space, and dynamic potential — while Black banks on long-term structural pressure and endgame technique. This tension between different advantages is what makes the Nimzo-Indian one of the richest strategic battlegrounds in modern chess, and precisely why it deserves systematic, structure-by-structure treatment.
Sequence: 1.d4 Pawn Structures »
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2h 29m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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In the golden age of positional chess, masters like Nimzowitsch and Petrosian built their reputations on a deceptively simple principle: restrict your opponent's possibilities first, then execute your own plan at leisure. This strategic philosophy—often called prophylaxis or restraint—remains one of chess's most elegant yet underappreciated concepts. GM Ioannis Papaioannou's How to Find the Right Plan revives this classical approach with modern precision, teaching players to identify and exploit long-term assets across all phases of the game.
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6h PGN Download Interactive Tests
Inside Your Games – Edition 2 is not a course about perfect moves.
It is a course about real thinking, in real games, under real conditions.
As GM Ioannis Papaioannou explains, the goal of this project is simple but rare:
to show how a strong player evaluates positions, forms plans, and makes decisions — not how a chess engine assigns numbers to moves.
Sequence: Inside Your Games »
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4h 10m PGN Download Interactive Tests