GM Smirnov 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.
Visit my official site here 

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.
Combining my chess experience and psychological knowledge, I started to create my own system of chess education. My chess results then became much better – I increased my rating to 2505, and at the young age of 20 became an International Grandmaster. My chess educational system corroborated its effectiveness in practice!
I was very happy that after a long period of hard work, everyday training and huge efforts, I had learnt the right way to train.Based on my experiences, I’ve decided to share this important knowledge and skills with other people, who want to get better in their own chess development. I believe it will help other people to save the significant time and alot of expenditure on futile efforts, and enjoy fast progress.
I have now obtained a Master’s degree in psychology and made some more improvements in my chess educational system.
So far I’ve had a lot of successful pupils, among them: Keith MacKinnon, Robert Kent, Justin Yu, Antonio Mendonca, Christopher Wright, Josh Rofrano, Pierre Kurdy, Shk. Mohammed Al Hamed, TARRAF Tarraf, Will Clayton and many others. You can read my pupils’ feedback on the web-pages of my courses: COURSES

Garry Kasparov presenting the 1st prize to Igor Smirnov “Kasparov’s Cup-2009″.

My chess career

• 1998 – «Independence-Cup’98» (B) – 2nd place.
• 2000 – Championship of Crimea – 1st place.
• 2000 – International tournament турнир «Alushta-2000» – 2nd place.
• 2001 – Championship of Ukraine (juniors) – 3rd place.
• 2002 – Championship of Ukraine (juniors) – 1st place.
• 2002 – International tournament “Sevastopol-2002” – 1st place.
• 2002 – European Team Championship – 3rd place.
• 2003 – World youth chess Olympiad – 2nd place.
• 2003 – Team Europe championship u18 – 3rd place (personal).
• 2003 – Clubs Arabic Championship – 4th place.
• 2004 – “2nd youth sport championship of Ukraine” – 1-2 place.
• 2005 – Championship of Ukraine (s\f) – 1st place.
• 2005 – «International tournament Czech-open» (J) – 1st place.
• 2005 – «Czech-open» (juniors) – 2nd place.
• 2006 – International masters tournament “Amman-2006” – 2nd place.
• 2007 – International chess tournament «Ilichevsk-2007» – 1st place.
• 2007 – «Memorial of E. Geller» (youth) – 1st place.
• 2008 – “Memorial of E. Geller” – 3rd place.
• 2009 – “Kasparov’s Cup” – 1st place.

• 2003 – Title of International Master.
• 2008 – Title of International Grandmaster.
• 1997-2004 – learning in the Sevastopol Sport School.Awarded the chess trainer certificate.
• 2005 onwards chess coach.
• I am an official teacher on the ICC (internet chess club):
  my profile
• I am one of the most popular teachers there:
  most active teachers

http://chess-teacher.com/1602-1-5-2.html

• 2009 – Got a Master’s degree in psychology.
• 2009-2011 – Developed the unique training video courses: COURSES