TalentOffer: Training with Grandelius

Laurin Perkampus, a member of our talent program TalentOffer, recently participated in a training camp with other talented players from the club.

Besides Laurin, Lara Janželj, Ellen Fredericia Nilssen and Eirik Aarnes all took part in the 12-hour online camp with Swedish no. 1 Nils Grandelius.

Laurin wrote an excellent report from the camp which we will bring to you unaudited - and there is a beautiful puzzle at the end of it.

Enjoy!

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Laurin: - Demanding, but fun

The topics we dealt with during the lessons reached from attacking chess to finding deep defensive ideas - and in general all themes were very instructive! In the days before the training sessions I was very excited since I had not yet worked with such an elite player. But Nils made us instantly feel comfortable during the lessons. Nevertheless, the exercises we had to solve were very demanding. Then again when looking back at them now they had also been fun.

At first it took me some time to adjust to this next level of handling chess positions but after some time I got used to the very deep way of thinking. This was one of the many things I took from the sessions and I will hopefully be able to apply this to my upcoming games and to my overall chess working style. The training sessions had been very intense, and we were able to learn a lot and I am sure this experience will have a big influence on our play for all of us. I want to end my report with a nice mating exercise we came across during the analysis of the game Topalov-Kamsky from 2006. Feel free to try it out, it is certainly one of the easier tasks we have to solve but I consider this one to be quite aesthetic.

White to move and win

You can find the solution here.

Finally I want to thank Nils Grandelius, the Offerspill sjakklubb and my fellow teammates for these very exciting weekends!