Viktor watched your week

A new kind of email started going out this week. Inside is a video, about two minutes long, and every second of it was built from your own recent games. The positions on the board are positions you actually reached. The clocks ticking underneath are your actual clocks, down to the second you had left when you moved. And the voice walking you through it is Viktor, our coach.

Who is Viktor?

Viktor is not a human, and he does not pretend to be one. He is our coach: opinionated, direct, and backed by the engine. Before an episode reaches you, every chess claim in it is checked against the engine. If Viktor says the rook belonged on the open file, the engine agreed before that sentence was allowed to ship. You can argue with his tone, but not with the board.

What an episode looks like

He picks the moments from your week that mattered: the position where the game turned, the pattern that keeps showing up, the clock reading at the exact moment your play changed. Then a single honest lesson rather than a list of five things to work on. And at the end, a mission for the coming week. Not homework that vanishes into the void: next episode, he checks whether you did it, against the games you actually played.

It works. One member just beat a friend rated about 200 points higher and credited the middlegame work. We will not name names. The video runs two minutes, and the mission at the end of it is the part we think matters most.

What early viewers said

Two requests came back more than everything else combined: make them longer, and show me my blunders. Noted, loudly. For now the episodes stay short on purpose, because a short lesson gets finished and a long one gets closed.

Episodes arrive by email, so there is nothing to check and nothing to remember. And if there is a game you want Viktor's read on right now, you do not have to wait for him to pick it: every game on your games page has an Ask Viktor button. Press it and that game gets the treatment.