Starting position for Thematic and general comments.

Please have a look at the starting position for our Thematic. Here.

As I have said earlier, main line French Defence is one of the best ways to learn and understand about the control of squares. In fact if you look at how our first IM Jimmy Liew play at tournaments you will see that a strong signature of his games is how he controls the squares surrounding his points of attack. So this is an important part of the learning process to becoming a strong player.

Having said that I have had some comments from parents that learning the french will confuse their kids. I beg to differ. I see the mind as an extremely powerful tool, a super computer unless you tell the mind that it cannot. Look at it this way. Our kids learn many subjects in school. Are they not able to digest all the different subjects if their confidence remains intact?

So there are almost no limitation to our minds except those that we self impose or if it is controlled by fear instead of reason. Besides the thematic is not meant to replace your opening repertoire. It is meant to continue your education in chess, in training events, to improve your ability to bring more to your competitive tournaments.

You may or you may not choose French as your final array of weaponry for your competitive battles. But you would be hard pressed to win without the understanding that French can teach you. These are all essential parts to becoming the complete mental warrior.

When you have the parts, then all you need is the right strategies and the winning mindset. When that happens, our GM will come. There are no shortcuts. The journey to becoming a strong player has little to do with ranking. Do you know that Lin Dan is ranked over 200 plus? And yet he can win against the top ranked players in the World. How do you think that is achieved?

All my best for Malaysian chess.

Register for Thematic here.