GM Noel Studer

Who is Noel Studer?

Noel is the youngest Swiss grandmaster, an impressive achievement given that he has a Traumatic Brain Injury. However, he is no longer a professional player and instead dedicates his time to his blog and YouTube channel, likely alongside other things.

NextLevelChess

NLC is his chess blog, where he gives a wide variety of useful improvement advice. I highly recommend it. I love it's improvement advice, apart from one aspect of it, which we'll get to later.

Courses

Beginner Chess Mastery

This is a chess course that teaches the basics of various aspects of chess to beginners. He says under 1200, but that is very vague as 1200 Chess.com and Lichess are extremely different.

The Simplified Chess Improvement System

This is his course and how to best train chess. Instead of teaching chess playing concepts, he details how to build a training plan and common mistakes to avoid.

The Art of Chess Training

This is his free E-book, which starts with 4 redundant chapters of introductions (when I say redundant, I mean REALLY redundant) followed by 7 chapters that walk you through how to build a training plan, step-by-step. Although I already had a training plan, I was able to improve it with his help. I highly recommend checking it out. However, I bet all of this is covered in The Simplified Chess Improvement System, bringing down the course's value.

What I Like

Good Advice

His blog, channel, and E-book both offer excellent advice on chess training, and I love them so much.

No BS

When ChessReps, one of the worst chess websites out there (worse than ChessMood) contacted him for a sponsorship, he ignored them. Why? He did a little research and revealed just how horrendous their courses are. These courses probably make players worse at chess after using them. Here is a YouTube video of his explaining this. A grandmaster channel had the audacity to claim that ChessReps was how they practiced openings. This was obviously false advertising, although I'm not sure that it's illegal.
That was the best example of GM Studer's care for the best quality. another example is the fact that, before the new updates, he didn't like Game Rewview and told us not to use it. Now, there are many people who say that (ChessDojo and RedPandaChess are the only ones I've heard of, but I'm sure there are others), but there are also plenty of masters who say that Game Review is useful on Chess.com's own blogs (either a sponsorship or just plain stupidity). He doesn't just blindly say something is good, he wants the best and supports the best...with one exception.

What I Dislike

He's contradicted himself.

I list 1 or 2 examples of this on my blog post on ChessMood, but another example is on his two latest videos. In the first, he said that beginners do not need to study openings because they will only give them a small advantage that won't matter due to tactics. In his next video, he said that ChessBook tells you the minimum opening below 1000, and his example did not involve any tactics. His beginner Chess Mastery course also has a repertiore, despite him advising against this. My gut tells me there's an explanation for this, and, if so, please let me know in the comments.

Support of ChessMood

Studer often recommends ChessMood on his blog. However, I've already explained why ChessMood sucks and how it's a scam in another post. He has an article explaining why he supports ChessMood so much, but I have counterarguments for most of the arguments he made. He does say that he gets a small percentage when you sign up with his link, which shows that he isn't in it for the money and is genuinely deluded into liking it. This does display honesty and morality, so W for him.

Course Pricing

Like I did for Chess.com Premium, I'm going to estimate the cost of his courses and compare them to the actual cost of his course.

Opening Principles

ChessDojo has an amazing video for this that differentiates "principles" from "guidelines."

How to Spot Tactics

This sounds really useful: it's what many beginners like me need. This is easily worth $10-$15.

Basic Strategy and Decision-Making

There may be. a few useful pointers in this section, but for the most part, you can find this in the Chess.com course Beginner Starter Kit and The Amateur's Mind: Free Lesson. If not, I'm sure there's helpful free videos out there. Strategy isn't even that important at this level. I'm going with $5-$10.

How to Win With An Extra Pawn

This also sounds useful. There are again, a few free resources online, but I'm not sure how good they are. I'll value this at at most $5 since this rarely comes up with beginners anyway.

In Game Thought-Process

This sounds pretty useful. I'll say this is $5-$10, depending in the quality. Together with the strategy section, this is at most $15.

How to Analyze Losses Honestly

I don't see how this is a problem. Maybe this is for others, but this is likely a very brief lesson. I'm going to say $4.

Beginner Repertiore

At this level, you shouldn't be using a repertiore. He said so himself (if you read between the lines). This is what GM Jesse Kraai and IMs Pruess and Kavutskiy also have said. Therefore, this is worthless.

That brings us to a grand total of $34-$39. The actual price is $97. Yeah. For fundamentals that you could likely find most of for free online. What about hsi other course? It has several sections, so I'm not going to bother estimating it. However, it doesn't actual teach how to play chess but is more focused on training and improvement. What does it cost? $397. This is so ridiculous and annoying.

Final Score

After carefully considering both his morality and his intelligence in terms of chess improvement and training, I give Noel a final score of 84%.

Outro

What did you think of my writing style? Are there some things I can improve? What do you think of Noel Studer based on what I've said? Do you have any counterarguments (I'm happy to debate)? Do you know anything else about Studer that you would like to share? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on these questions or anything else I've discussed in the comments.