FIDE Master and U16 World Champion: chess lessons that fix the mistakes you keep repeating

Mere om Agil

• When did you begin? How did this passion find you?

  I was five years old. My father taught me the moves at home and then took me to our local club in Baku, which is where it became serious. Azerbaijan is a country where chess is part of ordinary childhood — it is taught in schools and the national team is followed the way football is followed elsewhere — so a child who shows anything is noticed quickly. But what kept me was not winning. It was the moment I understood that a position could be explained: that the good move was not luck or memory, but something you could reason your way to. I have been chasing that feeling for thirty years and I still get it a few times a month.

• Which players or works influence you most?

  Three, and they pull in different directions, which is exactly why they are useful. Mikhail Tal taught me that a position is not a spreadsheet — that a move can be correct because of the problems it creates for a human being on the other side of the board. Magnus Carlsen taught me the opposite discipline: that a tiny advantage is worth something if you are willing to play forty more moves to prove it. And Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual is the book that taught me rigour — that "I understand this" and "I can execute this under a clock" are not the same sentence. A player needs all three: imagination, patience, and precision.

• What qualities and skills does success in this field require?

  Three, and none of them is talent. First, honesty — the ability to look at your own game and name the real mistake instead of the comfortable one. Second, tolerance for boredom: calculation is not exciting while you are doing it, and the players who improve are the ones who keep counting after they have already found a move they like. Third, recovery. Everyone loses badly. The difference between a 1400 and a 2000 is largely what they do in the 48 hours after a loss.
  4) Your most valuable advice for staying focused on a long project?
  Work on your own games, not on someone else's. Twenty minutes a day reviewing your last serious game — without an engine on the first pass — will do more than three hours of videos on Sunday. And limit yourself to one theme at a time. A student who spends a month on a single pawn structure will remember it for life; a student who "studies chess" for a month remembers nothing. Narrow, repeated, written down.

• Your most valuable advice for staying focused on a long project?

  Work on your own games, not on someone else's. Twenty minutes a day reviewing your last serious game — without an engine on the first pass — will do more than three hours of videos on Sunday. And limit yourself to one theme at a time. A student who spends a month on a single pawn structure will remember it for life; a student who "studies chess" for a month remembers nothing. Narrow, repeated, written down.

• How would you describe your passion? How does it make you feel?

  Chess is the only place I know where you cannot hide. There is no committee and no interpretation — the position is what it is, and after the game the moves tell you exactly what you understood and what you only thought you understood. That is uncomfortable, and it is why I love it. Teaching adds the second half: watching someone find a plan on their own, in a position where two months earlier they would have moved a random piece. That never stops being satisfying.

• Which achievements are you particularly proud of?

  As a player: World Under-16 Champion, European Under-14 Champion, and a silver medal at the Chess Olympiad. I have also won international opens in Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain — the one I remember best is the first Rapid "Il Lago in Scacco" on Lake Maggiore, where I scored 7 out of 8 and finished ahead of the tournament favourite, GM Sabino Brunello.
  As a coach, though, the results I care about more belong to my students — among them a national Under-12 champion and the winner of the 2025 Victorian Women's Chess Championship in Australia. A title you win yourself, you remember. A title a student wins after a year of your lessons, you feel differently about.

• Have you ever been surprised by a student's ability or speed of progress?

  Gabriel, in Canada. He came to me at around 700 on Chess.com and was close to 2000 a year later. I have seen fast improvement before, but not that fast — and what surprised me was not his ability, it was his appetite. He worked constantly between lessons, read far beyond the material I gave him, and came back every week with questions I had not asked him to think about. That is the real variable. I can give two students the same lesson, and the one who is curious about the answer will be three hundred points ahead of the one who is satisfied with it.

• Being a Superprof is an art. What is your secret?

  I do not teach a syllabus. Every lesson begins with the student's own recent games, because that is the only honest source of information about what they actually do not know. From there I teach them to ask the same four questions in any position: What is my worst piece? What does the pawn structure tell me? What does my opponent want? Which exchange can I force? The goal is not that they play well while I am in the room. It is that they play well when I am not.