From Master to Author - Meet Coach Adarsh

At Magnus Chess Academy we are incredibly proud of our coaching staff.  Because we have a diverse team, there’s a good chance that we have just the right coach for your child.  All of our coaches love teaching kids and love the game of chess too.  However, not all of our coaches are active tournament players and soon-to-be published authors.  Coach Adarsh is all of these things and we are excited to share some of Adarsh’s story and news about his upcoming Chessable course.  Adarsh’s new course, “World Class: Ding Liren by FM Adarsh Tripathi”, features the games of world championship challenger Ding Liren and will be published just in time for the April title match. 

Coach Adarsh -- thinking about what comes next

Adarsh is a young coach and very popular with the Queens and Kings level students in our online academy.  It must be youthful energy that allows him to teach classes, play in international tournaments, and produce a new Chessable course.  At one point, Adarsh was traveling, for extended periods, from his home in India to play tournaments in Europe.  That hectic schedule paid off in 2022 when he finally climbed past the rating requirement for the title of FIDE Master (or FM).  Our coaches are always out playing tournaments but becoming a titled player is something special.  We think it’s a big deal! And we are very happy to have FM Adarsh teaching with us. 

Adarsh kept up his teaching assignments while pursuing the FM title.  And before starting the Chessable course, he was the primary author on some of our online summer camps. Many professional players have reported that teaching and writing can provide a valuable change of perspective from the constant grind of tournament play. We generally think that teaching kids is its own reward but both teaching and writing can have a mysterious effect on your own play.  Since starting work on the new Ding Liren course, Adarsh has noticed some improvements in his own chess playing.  We don’t quite understand this phenomenon but we hope that Adarsh continues to teach and write his way to greater chess success.  

Anyone who meets Adarsh will know that he genuinely loves chess and has a boundless enthusiasm for the game.  So it’s no surprise that he and his friend just came up with the idea to create a Chessable course profiling the Chinese grandmaster and world championship contender.  Chessable approved Adarsh’s idea very quickly and he has spent several months putting the content together.  This was no small undertaking.  The new course features detailed analysis of 30 of Ding’s best games and includes about 15 hours of video instruction.  We like to think that Ding would approve of this new course but he probably is very busy preparing for the world championship match.  The rest of the world, and maybe Nepomniachtchi’s team, eagerly await the release of Adarsh’s new course. 

One reason Adarsh chose Ding Liren as a subject is that we in the chess world know very little about him.  We know that he has been a fixture in the world top 20 for several years.  We know that his rating peaked at a lofty 2816 in 2018.  We know that he once played 100 consecutive games without losing a single game.  Obviously Ding is an incredible chess talent.  But what else do we know about him?  Coach Adarsh says that we don’t know very much about Ding partly because he lives in China but mostly because Ding is very reserved by nature.  You might say that Ding was letting his chess speak for itself long before Hans Niemann made that expression infamous.  In interviews he will sometimes jump into deep analysis but often says very little at all.  He just wins a lot. 

In writing the course, Adarsh wanted to convey deep understanding by carefully examining the decisions made on each move.  We can’t really know what Ding was thinking and feeling (that book would have to be written by Ding himself) but we can learn a lot from his chess moves. Adarsh was influenced by classic chess books and more modern Chessable courses.  He cites Chernev’s classic book “Logical Chess: Move By Move” and GM Ganguly’s Chessable courses (part 1 and part 2) on the Nimzo, as major influences on his chess writing style.  Basically, Adarsh believes that a good chess author needs to “decrypt” complex variations rather than just quoting lines from a computer engine.  To do this, the author must anticipate the human questions and provide answers that help us understand.  By the way, Coach Adarsh uses the same approach when preparing for his regular classes.  He tries to imagine “what questions are kids going to ask?” and makes sure to have answers ready in a digestible form.  

The world championship match is a best of 14 contest and Adarsh predicts it will be one of the closest matches in a long time.  You can find out more in the excellent “Everything We Know So Far” article on chess.com.  The first game should happen on April 9th, which gives you plenty of time to thoroughly review Adarsh’s new course before the championship match begins.  Or you could take your time. Adarsh says the course is aimed at anyone with a rating between 1200 and 2200.  Nepo is currently rated 2795 and probably has done his own extensive preparation on Ding.  The rest of us really will appreciate Adarsh’s help to “decrypt” what happened in some of Ding’s complicated tactical games.  

We want to take this opportunity to wish Adarsh great success with the launch of his new Chessable course.  We can’t know for sure if Adarsh will become a “famous” chess author.  We do know that he loves the game and that, in the eyes of his students at Magnus Chess Academy, he is already pretty famous anyway.