The Chess Gym Is Closed in Its Current Form

Thoughts and lessons from the last five months.

The message on our website www.thechessgym.com

As most of you know I started The Chess Gym together with FM Nate Solon at the end of last year. We set out to build a simple and effective chess training community based on our core training ideas: daily solving, weekly sparring games, and annotating those games. Ideas we believe in.

We built a paid community around this idea. Here five months after launching the community, we have had to give up on our idea in its current form.

We sent the following message to the members of The Chess Gym:

”Hi all,

We are sad to be sharing some big news today. We’ve determined that we have to close The Chess Gym, at least as a business. We are planning to continue the community in a free capacity. More on that in a moment, but first, why this decision?

One of our core principles, when we started The Chess Gym, was consistent practice in the form of solving daily positions. While we still think this is a great idea from a chess improvement perspective, and the members who kept up with it saw impressive gains in their chess, it put a lot of pressure both on members and on us as organizers. It’s really hard to do something every day, even for a short amount of time.

We noticed that when members “fell off the wagon” in terms of doing the daily position, they often disengaged from the community. At the same time, we weren’t seeing the membership growth we would need to keep putting in the necessary time commitment to create new training material every day. Finally, changing circumstances in the form of increased work requirements for Martin and Nate’s baby forced us to make a decision.

Ultimately, the most valuable part of The Chess Gym isn’t the training material – you can find chess puzzles in any number of books and websites. It’s the community of engaged, positive, and supportive chess improvers. For that reason, we want to make sure everyone can continue the relationships they’ve created in The Chess Gym. We are creating a Slack community that will be open to all members. Our hope is that this community can continue the best features of The Chess Gym, like vibrant discussions, constructive feedback, and arranging training games. But it will be free and participation will be voluntary and self-paced.

Some brass tacks: we will continue regular programming until the end of April, and of course, everyone who signed up for an annual membership will get a refund for the remaining term of their membership.

Finally, thank you for being part of this! While it ultimately did not work out as a business, the community, training, and relationships have been tremendously valuable. We hope you’ll join us in carrying on those elements in the free community.

Martin & Nate”

After investing many, many hours into a project, it is a sour pill to swallow. It was especially hard also because of the members we had who were enjoying the community and had seen a positive effect on their chess.

But the reality is that we couldn’t get our membership to grow beyond 100-110 members. For us to invest so much time into a project we needed to see some signs of growth, but it was not happening sadly. An option would have been to invest more time into promotion and building the community, but we both did not have more time to give.

One learning has been that running a community is very time-consuming
I haven’t had time and energy to focus on my chess in the last months. I have spent almost all my free time on The Chess Gym. On the surface, it might seem simple, but there are many hidden management tasks. Just creating the weekly daily positions has taken me around 3-4 hours each week.

Further just thinking and worrying about how to make the community a success throughout the day has taken up my mental headspace, which I think long-term would start to affect me. This has also made me think about what kind of role chess should play in my life. And I think moving forward I will focus on creating content in a way that fits better into my weekly schedule with family and a full-time job.

The Chess Gym Habit tracker

A second learning has been that doing chess every day is very hard for most adults
The main premise of our training program was to solve one daily position each day. That sounds simple, but when you look over an adult’s weekly schedule there will be days when there isn’t room for 10 minutes of chess. That meant we lost members when life got in the way of solving. Even though we said that a weekly free day was fine, it seemed like members aimed for all or nothing.

I think this learning is universal in the sense that when reading a chess book or a course we often get sidetracked after a good start to never return to that material again. Our brains do not want to do hard things, so when there is even the smallest way out we take that route. I’m also guilty of doing this many times.

A third learning has been that community beats a detailed training program
I have been overly impressed by the kind people who have joined The Chess Gym. Many are readers of Say Chess, so thank you for being so kind. The conversations, the shared lessons and wins, and the post-mortems we have had have been joyful.

That is also why we want to create and transition The Chess Gym into a free community, where these talks hopefully can continue and more people get the chance to take part.

In the last months, I have learned a lot as a chess content creator and as a chess player. Even though we failed as a business, I think we have helped the members get further on their chess journey. That is ultimately what motivates me.

If you want to join The Chess Gym in its new form we will soon share more information.

/Martin