Master Method Review - Revolutionize Your Chess by Simon Williams

The first chapter of Simon Williams Master Method 2 is available for free on the ichess.net You Tube channel...

  With some spare time on my hands as I decompress from a year of working 50+ hour weeks and begin the search for my next job I started watching Simon Williams’s the Ginger GM) Master Method 2 : Revolutionize your Chess offering from ichess.net. If you clicked the link you may have noticed that the price of this 15 hour chess course is listed at $149 and you may think that is a little pricey. I would agree with you but will also point out that if you are on the ichess.net mailing list you will not only receive free samples of the ichess.net offerings (in addition to the course samples on their YouTube page), you will also receive massive discounts on all their offerings if you exhibit a moderate amount of patience. I purchased the Ginger GM Method at a 70% discount in November which meant that the ‘$149’ course only cost me $43.50 which works out to be less than $3 an hour which is just a little more than renting a DVD from the nearby Family Video in Marshalltown, Iowa.

  Simon Williams is an English grandmaster with a popular You Tube channel and is known for his hyper aggressive style. I had watched his first Master Method course (purchased for 50% off in July) which was billed as containing ‘Chess Improvement Secrets for the Busy Player). The course was 16 hours and gave an hour on each subject that Williams deemed important to get a player up to speed quickly – openings that can be played for both white and black, the main endings a player should know by heart, defensive play, attacking play, etc.. The production values were similar to most of ichess.net lessons – the left side of the screen is taken up by the board and the right hand side of the screen is mostly a backdrop with a small inset of the instructor on video giving the lesson. The ‘Master Method’ lessons are generally prefaced by a few minutes of the instructor in some exotic locale like the view from a high rise office building, a garden, and in Williams’ case in front of some amazing architecture in Barcelona. Williams’ master method course was entertaining enough but with few exceptions boiled down to the boilerplate ichess.net lessons which are loosely themed topics explained by the presenter going over Grandmaster games. The main takeaway I got from Williams Master Method was that even the Secrets for a busy player take a lot of effort in order to get real improvement.

  In Williams second course the introduction takes place in the setting of an exotic rock garden but the location is not used to preface the rest of the lessons which has Williams in his ‘GingerGM’ t-shirt going over his material (although the last three lessons are prefaced with Williams in a dress shirt sitting at a desk. This course is subtitled ‘Revolutionize Your Chess’ and Williams is serious about this subject. He gives a tight opening repertoire that aims for isolated pawn positions with White and the French and English (e6 and d6) as Black. Williams then gives hours of examples of typical attacking plans with the isolated queen pawn and black positions but instead of going through entire games he breezes through the openings and doesn’t show the end of the game if the attack leads to a material or overwhelming positional advantage. This allows him to go through more examples than the 3 to 4 games typical to ichess.net lessons.

  The rest of the Ginger GM Master method 2 goes into getting into an attacking mindset. There are chapters on being aware to attacking possibilities, not attacking prematurely, and the nuts and bolts of attacking and calculating variations. The chapters on attacking are very practical and as tight as the opening repertoire and middle game plan section. The examples were clearly thought out to build on each other. One attacking example leads to another similar but slightly different pattern that allows Williams to challenge the view to determine whether the same attacking idea will work or not. All chess courses end up having some contradictory advices and this course is no exception. After spending four hours recommending an opening repertoire based on getting an isolated queens pawn and how to use the isolated pawn to generate an attack there a more than a few examples in the attacking and calculating section where Williams breezily claims one side is better because the opponent has an isolated queens pawn or some of the same positional defects that the isolated pawn brings like more pawn islands. It just goes to show that it in chess it all depends and I suppose by learning to play with the isolated queen pawn one will certainly learn the shortcomings of the setup whjich will come in handy when facing the isolated pawn.

  I think this course explains a philosophy of attack better than any of ichess.net’s other offerings. The material is well thought out and not sugar-coated in any way. Williams continually says the course is meant to be viewed more than once and insists that the viewer will reap better results from practicing his principles of attack in long time limit games. He asks the view to pause the lessons to determine a plan or calculate a line on multiple occasions and repeatedly points out that his course is only the signposts and the road to chess improvement is paved with hard work.

  The only quibble I have is that while the content was obviously carefully thought out the presentation seems to have been rushed to get to market. The videos are full of annoying interruptions of Chessbase popups or blank screens that could have been edited out or done in another take. The inset of Williams talking seems pixelated and blurry and there is even a part in the final chapter where Williams’ pet cat makes an appearance. Williams takes great pains to be seriously professional in the course and forgoes most of the ‘entertainment’ (singing, cursing, shouting, etc…) that is a staple of his YouTube channel but the presentation has a certain sloppiness that doesn’t match the sterling content. Again this is only a quibble and I think that Williams’ ‘Revolutionize Your Chess’ Master Method delivers a product that made it a bargain at $43 and probably worth the full price of $150 for the devoted student.