Under 20 African Chess champion, IM Hamed Wafa was one of the 13 future chess stars selected to participate in the Chessable Academy in-person training camp in Menocra from 27 March to 2 April 2024.
Prior to taking part in the in-person camp, Hamed was amongst 450 students from over 100 federations who were successful enrolled for 3rd grade of the FIDE Chessable Academy.
The FIDE Chessable Academy brings together top players and coaches teaching a specially designed training program for future chess masters.
The roster of lecturers featured esteemed coaches and chess legends, such as Hou Yifan, Stefanova Antoaneta, Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Alexander Khalifman, Boris Gelfand, Artur Jussupow, Mikhail Gurevich, Ramesh R B, Vladimir Potkin, Aleksey Dreev, Vladimir Malakhov, Victor Bologan, Igor Lysyj, Evgeniy Najer, Miguel Illescas, Yevgeniy Vladimirov, Surya Ganguly, Sergei Tiviakov, Anton Filippov, Melikset Khachiyan, Thomas Luther, Yannick Gozzoli, Farrukh Amonatov, Alexey Kuzmin, Igor Khenkin, Hicham Hamdouchi, Georgui Castaneda, Dejan Bojkov, Ilaha Kadimova, Robert Hungaski, Reynaldo Vera, Alonso Zapata, and Vishal Sareen.
The program aims to unravel important skills and techniques. It includes a meticulous study of important chess openings explained by leading experts in these specific areas, exploring typical and innovative ideas, abundant secrets, as well as practical challenges and revealing various topics. The topics include the evaluation of the position and the plan, prophylactic thinking, principles of attack, principles of defense, how to play against the pieces, un-evident moves and full board vision, danger of passed pawns, practical rook endings, correct and incorrect attack, “bad” pieces, advantage realization principles, feeling of danger, the principle of two weaknesses in addition to other important topics.
13 exceptional young talents out of 450 chess players are then selected to participate in the FIDE Chessable In-Person Training Camp, led by GM Judit Polgar and GM Artur Jussupow.
The FIDE Chessable Academy in-person training camp, organized by the FIDE Trainers’ Commission, covered essential aspects of chess gameplay, including exploring typical and innovative opening ideas, position evaluation, game planning, prophylactic thinking, principles of attack and defence, piece evaluation, and exploiting weaknesses in a position. In addition to the chess mastery class, the participants also took part in the “FIDE Personal Growth Academy”, where they were taught about the importance of developing social skills and personal development.
The session featured experts like Dana Reizniece-Ozola, Geert van der Velde, Maria Yuste, and Natalia Ryzhenko, covering topics such as the power of a personal brand, the rules of communication and the dress and ethics codes of FIDE.
PHOTO CREDIT: FIDE Chessable Academy and IM Hamed Wafa