Gotham Chess Courses Review: Is it Worth to Buy?
Gotham Chess announced his course creation platform Chessly, where he transferred all of his courses with some new features. Previously he hosted all the courses on Kajabi, which is a course creation platform. In this article, I am going to give you my honest review of Gotham Chess courses which are very popular.
Each Gotham Chess course costs $64. Each course consists of video lessons, drills, and also puzzles, and studies in a few courses. His primary audience is below 1800-rated players. Overall GothamChess courses value for money for beginners and intermediate chess players.
All of these courses covered most of the concepts of that topic. If you are an advanced level chess player or chess master, buy chess courses from chessable or chessbase.
About Levy Rozman
Levy Rozman is an American International Master with a FIDE rating of 2322. He achieved his IM title in the year 2018. In a lockdown, he becomes very popular on Twitch. Then he slowly started posting videos on Youtube. Within less than two years, he gained more than 1.5M subscribers, which is enormous.
Levy Rozman started Levy Rozman Scholarship Fund in October 2021. With this, he is aiming to help more and more chess players to become champions.
Levy becomes so much popular because of his unique explanation style and way of teaching.
About Gotham Chess
Gotham Chess is a channel of Levy Rozman where Levy uploads regular videos. Levy also streams on Twitch with the name GothamChess. Initially, he started his website www.gothamchess.com to sell courses. Very few people know that his name is not Gotham.
Gotham Chess Courses Review
Currently, Levy has published nine courses on his new site, Chessly. Every course is priced at $64 and recommended for below 1800 players. Following are his courses and my short review of each course.
Beginner Chess
In this course, you will understand all the fundamentals of chess openings, chess middlegames, and chess endgames. This course is recommended for beginner players.
Intermediate Chess
After finishing the beginner chess course, you can go for this course. In this course, you will understand advanced techniques and tactics which will help you cross the 1500 rating.
Caro Kann
This is an opening course against 1.e4. IM Levy explained Caro Kann in these 3+ hours of videos. Suitable for players who don’t know or know the basics of Car Kann.
D4 Dynamite
After doing this course, you can start playing 1d4 confidently. This course is designed for beginners and intermediate players. Levy suggested playing London and Trompovsky to avoid main lines.
E4 New York style
This is also a short and sweet course on 1.e4. In this course, Gotham recommended all sidelines and a few traps and tricks suitable for all players.
E6/B6 Defense
This course is unique. In this course, he suggested playing first move e6 and then b6 from the black side. I mainly didn’t find that helpful content compared to another course. You can skip this course.
Modern Defense
I myself played this opening from 2016 to 2022 and found very good results. To prepare for this opening, I have used Victor’s Bologan course published on Chessbase. Modern chess starts with e4 g6. In many variations, black can start the attack with confidence. I would recommend learning this opening to everyone!
Gambits for White and Black (Separate courses)
Gambits are basically sacrifices given to gain an advantage. In this course, Gotham explained various gambit variations that you can use to outplay your opponents in blitz games. This course is quite suitable for chess lovers who want to learn different funny openings.
Pricing of Gotham Chess courses
All the courses are priced at $64 each. Many fans and subscribers criticized the pricing structure. I believe $64 is a reasonable price for the value Levy is providing. Also, he is starting a new business, and this pricing is in the initial stages.
Of course, if we compare it with any other course website like Modern Chess or ChessBase, the pricing is an issue. Other websites provide courses anywhere between $10-$50.
I would say it’s your decision to buy the courses or not. Hopefully, Gotham Chess will reduce the price in the future.
In his video, he mentioned that Chessly would introduce plus membership which will be available for around $10 per month, in which you will get access to all courses, and also, there will be a few live sessions by Levy.
Chessly plus will probably be available in November 2022.
Unique Features of GothamChess
Gotham chess is managing a lot of tasks. He is streaming, posting a daily chess video on Youtube, Running a podcast, dealing with sponsors, promoting chess, and giving free knowledge to everyone. It is very tough to do all this. Many people will say that he is getting good returns and money. Money is not the only thing once you achieve a certain level. Posting a daily video becomes monotonous, which he has been doing since last year or more.
You can purchase his course to show some support to him.
Are Gotham Chess Courses Worth It?
This is a big question. I would say his courses are a little bit overpriced. These courses should be priced between $29-49, but he kept pricing $64 for each course.
As I stated above, Chessly will introduce Chessly premium membership in November 2022, which will give access to all the courses with a fixed monthly subscription pricing. This is a very similar concept to ChessMood, which I reviewed already.
What is Chessly?
Chessly is a course creation platform by GothamChess, aka IM Levy Rozman. Chessly is different from other websites as on Chessly, you can do everything on one platform.
Currently, there are only nine courses by Gotham chess on Chessly, but after a few months, you will see many courses by other creators.
Chessly will also introduce Chessly+, where you can access entire website content and a few live classes.
All the individual chess courses you purchase will be there for a lifetime. I really found this website interesting and hope to see Chessly as a million-dollar company.
