Autobiography
Hi, I am Igor Smirnov, International Grandmaster and chess coach.In this section you can read some information about me.

I started to play chess at the age 8. After a year of training, I attained the First category and became champion of Sevastopol (my native town) among schoolboys. I enjoyed the game and my rating increased quite quickly. At the age 13 after winning several international tournaments, I achieved the title of International Master.
Then I started to play mainly in the adult tournaments and realised that it wasn’t so simple to win there. I trained hard for about 6-8 hours a day, had many coaches and read a lot of chess books. But then it came to me that a lot of new information wasn’t making my game stronger!
The coaches offered me loads of different training systems, but they didn’t know the answer to this simple question. “How to make real progress and start to play chess better?” No one said to me: “I know exactly what to do and I can guarantee your progress”.
From that time onwards, I began to think about the right way of training and improving myself. That’s why I took an interest in psychology: it explains how the human brain works. After understanding some principles of a human’s thinking process, I grasped why the usual way of training is so ineffective.