GM Ioannis Papaioannou opens a new direction in Strategy Wednesday this October — a series that will continue over the coming months, devoted to the one subject that governs every other: how strong players actually decide.
Most training material teaches you what to know. Very little of it teaches you what to do with what you know when the clock is running, the position is unclear, and two reasonable moves point in opposite directions.
That is the gap this series addresses. Across the months ahead, GM Papaioannou will work through the whole of the decision-making process — static and dynamic factors, calculation, time management, the psychology of the player on the other side of the board, and the practical judgment that ties them together.
Every player reaches a point where more knowledge stops producing better results. You know the structures. You can calculate. And still, in the critical position, you choose the wrong candidate — not from ignorance, but because nothing in your training ever addressed the choice itself.
Strong players are not simply better informed. They weigh differently: they know which factors matter in which positions, when to trust a long-term feature and when the moment demands concrete action, how much time a decision deserves, and when their own judgment is being distorted by fatigue, by the opponent, or by what happened three moves ago.
These are trainable skills. They are just rarely trained.
The first camp lays the groundwork — the factors a player has to weigh, and the judgment that decides between them.
Some advantages are permanent: pawn structure, weak squares, the pair of bishops, a long-term weakness. Others are temporary: the initiative, a lead in development, an exposed king, a piece that is momentarily misplaced. The permanent ones outlast the game; the temporary ones expire.
Almost every serious strategic error comes from misjudging which should decide. The player who sacrifices structure for an initiative that was never real; the player who nurses a long-term advantage while the position burns down around him. Both knew the factors. Neither weighed them correctly.
This training will not only sharpen your strategic understanding — it will improve the quality of your decisions in the positions where games are actually decided.
Strategy Wednesday takes place over two Wednesdays — 14.10.2026 and 21.10.2026 — with two sessions per day. After each training day, participants receive test positions designed to reinforce the concepts introduced during the lectures, with solutions included in the final PGN file.
All sessions are part of the Modern Chess Academy: Academy members receive free access to the live lectures and to the complete digital product released afterward.
✓ Dates: 14.10.2026 and 21.10.2026
✓ Platform: Zoom
✓ Coach: GM Ioannis Papaioannou
14.10.2026 – Paris | New York
🕒 17:30 – 19:00 | 11:30 – 13:00 – Decision Making – Part 1
🕒 19:30 – 21:00 | 13:30 – 15:00 – Decision Making – Part 2
21.10.2026 – Paris | New York
🕒 17:30 – 19:00 | 11:30 – 13:00 – Decision Making – Part 3
🕒 19:30 – 21:00 | 13:30 – 15:00 – Decision Making – Part 4
🕒 21:00 – 21:30 | 15:00 – 15:30 – Q&A with GM Grigor Grigorov & GM Petar Arnaudov
This is the first instalment of a series that will run across the coming months. Each camp takes on another part of the decision-making process, and together they build something no single course can: not more knowledge, but better use of the knowledge you already have.
🎓 This event is free for academy members.