The Most Common Mistake Chess Coaches Make (According to Chess Coaches)

Four coaches, one near-unanimous answer

I’m working on a project about the craft of chess coaching, so I sent a short survey to working coaches. Four of them filled it out, ranging from a FM who creates content for a living to a full-time trainer GM with 37 years of experience and a 2460 USCF rating. Different careers, different student bases, different countries.

I asked a lot of questions, but one answer kept coming back in different words. So I’ll lead with it.

Question: What is something you think a lot of chess coaches get wrong or could do better?

Answer: Many coaches teach what’s easy for them to teach, not what the student actually needs.

Here’s what they actually said. A full-time coach rated around 2500 FIDE put it bluntly: “They teach what is best for them, rather than what is best for the student.” Melikset Khachiyan, a GM who has been coaching for 37 years and trained multiple national champions, answered the question with one word: “Ego.” James Canty, a FM and full-time content creator, pointed at a specific version of it: “trying to force them to play openings that may not suit them.” And a 2377 FIDE coach who studied under one of the best trainers in the world said the issue is “not tailoring their lessons to the student’s personality and needs.”

Four coaches, four different careers, same diagnosis from four different angles. That got my attention.

Why This Happens

I want to be fair to other coaches here, because I don’t think most of them are lazy or cynical. The honest version is that the system rewards the wrong thing.

Teaching what’s easy to teach feels productive for both sides. The lesson has a clear topic. The student walks away with concrete material and maybe a PGN file. The coach didn’t have to figure anything new out that week. Both people feel good about the hour. The trouble is that “feels productive” and “is productive” aren’t the same thing, and it can take months or years before the gap shows up in the student’s rating.

So coaches drift toward the legible stuff. The stuff that’s easy to prep, easy to deliver, and easy for the student to recap when their parent or spouse asks what they learned today.

Exhibit A: Openings

The clearest example is opening prep, and it’s the one Canty named directly.

Openings are tailor-made to feel like good coaching. They have a clear structure (moves, lines, ideas), they produce visible homework, and they make both parties feel like real work got done. The student gets a repertoire. The coach gets to talk about something they know cold. Everyone wins, on paper.

But for most students under roughly 1800, games aren’t being decided in the opening. They’re being decided by one-move blunders, miscalculation, time trouble, and emotional decisions made in the middlegame. The opening lesson feels productive but usually isn’t the best use of the coaching time.

I had a 1400-rated student come to me a while back specifically wanting opening help. That’s how it goes a lot of the time: students show up convinced their openings are the problem because the opening is the part of the game they remember most clearly when they lose. I analyzed his games before we got started, and his openings were fine for his level. What was killing him was calculation. He was making moves based on what looked right rather than checking concrete lines two or three moves deep.

We did work on his openings a bit, mostly to get him comfortable and confident with what he was already playing. But the bulk of our work was calculation. That’s what actually raised his rating.

If I had spent our lessons giving him the opening prep he asked for, he’d have left every session feeling like he learned something, and his rating wouldn’t have changed much. He probably would've assumed he hit a plateau and eventually quit. The lessons would’ve felt great and produced nothing.

To be clear, I’m not anti-opening-prep. When a student is at a rating where openings genuinely matter, or when their games show a real opening weakness, or when they bring specific questions, then we do work on openings. Openings are a tool. The problem is when they get used as the default lesson content regardless of what the student actually needs, because they’re the path of least resistance for the coach.

What Else Falls in This Bucket

Openings are the clearest example, but they’re not the only one. A short list of other things that are easy to deliver and often don’t move the needle: showing students your own games (impressive, mostly useless to them) without a clear payoff, running through famous master games without tying them to the student’s actual weaknesses, generic puzzle drilling that isn’t matched to the student’s pattern gaps, and endgame theory the student will never reach in their games.

None of these are bad in isolation. I’ve used all of these things at various times when they directly applied to what the student needs to work on. However, all of them become bad when they’re the default instead of the prescription.

What’s Hard to Teach but Actually Works

The flip side is the stuff that’s hard to deliver and genuinely improves players.

Fixing how a student thinks during a game. Getting them to think in concrete moves and sequences rather than in vague principles and words. Working on the mental side: how they handle frustration, how they recover from a loss, how they show up to a tournament on day three when they’re tired and behind. Raising the floor of their play before chasing the ceiling, because rating reflects your average performance and your worst games drag the average down harder than your best games lift it.

I’ll be honest about why many coaches avoid this stuff. It’s hard to prep, hard to measure, and hard to recap. There’s no satisfying “today we covered the Najdorf” at the end of the lesson. The student doesn’t walk away with a file they can study. They walk away with a slightly different way of approaching their next game, and the change might not show up on a board for weeks.

That’s the work. But it doesn’t market itself the way a repertoire does.

The Reframe

If you’re shopping for a coach, the question to ask isn’t “what will we cover.” Any competent coach can answer that, and the answer will sound reasonable.

The better question is something like, “what are you going to make me work on that I don’t want to work on?” Or, “what are you going to tell me I’m wrong about?” The answer to those questions tells you whether the coach is going to serve you or serve themselves.

Coaching that feels comfortable is usually coaching that’s serving the coach.

If you’ve had a coaching experience that fits or breaks this pattern, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Reply to this email or drop a comment. I’m collecting more material for a longer project on what good chess coaching actually looks like, and the stories are the most useful part.

Finally, if you’re interested in trying out coaching with myself, then you can check out my website (https://daltonperrine.com/coaching/) or book a free 15-minute consultation to ask me any questions (https://daltonperrine.setmore.com/).