Herman Grooten - An interview with a chess authority

by Arne Kaehler
11/6/2020 – Herman Grooten’s first ChessBase show was launched two weeks ago. What makes the show special is Grooten’s teaching style. He uses elements of the “step method”, where players with zero chess knowledge can advance to strong club players, or even become a GM, as Jan Smeets has proven impressively. Furthermore, his whole life has been dedicated to chess from an early age! Herman will tell you more about this in a two-part video interview. The second part consists of two stunning positions, where knights move to the most unexpected spots on the chessboard.
In 60 minutes you can get an idea how to play versus the Kings Indian like an expert like GM Loek van Wely, known for his epic battles in the Kingsindian with Teimour Radjabov.

“When I was around 22 years old I decided to live from chess, and I never regretted this decision” 

Interview Part 1

  • Who is Herman Grooten? - 0:40
  • The authority in chess - 4:06
  • A unique style of teaching - 5:30
  • Grooten also wrote some books - 9:30

Interview Part 2 - with two exercises

  • Exercise 1 - 0:11
  • Exercise 2 - 6:36

Herman Grooten

As a 15-year-old, he was already put at a demonstration board to give chess lessons. The first talent he coached was the quite famous Loek van Wely. Later he trained more players who became grandmasters. Among them, we can name Jan Werle, Robin Swinkels, Wouter Spoelman, Twan Burg and more recently Benjamin Bok. In 2016 Attacking Chess for Club Player came out. More information (in Dutch) on www.sterkspel.nl.

Dutch Defence Powerbase 2020 is a database and contains a total of 7890 games from Mega 2020 and the Correspondence Database 2020, of which 688 are annotated.

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Arne Kaehler, a creative mind who is passionate about board games in general, was born in Hamburg and learned to play chess at a young age. By teaching chess to youth teams and creating chess-related videos on YouTube, Arne was able to expand this passion and has even created an online course for anyone who wants to learn how to play chess. Arne writes for the English and German news sites, but focuses mainly on content for the ChessBase media channels.

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