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Introducing "FST, FT, FI, & NI" Titles to the list of Lichess.org Coaches

#1
Hi Everyone!

So I'm sure most of you are aware that lichess.org has a nice feature that showcases coaches on their website, so people can get in touch easily if they'd like to get lessons and elevate their game.

I like the concept of this, but I believe it can be massively improved.

I remember in the past, anyone with a FIDE profile could sign up to be a lichess.org coach, and coaches could get reviews too. I do remember, however, that the reviews feature got removed since there were cases of coaches fabricating their reviews to boost their visibility on the platform. I also understand that there must've been an over-saturation of coaches at that time too, so I can understand why lichess would want to limit the coaches list to titled players only.

However, I don't see why the list should be limited to players with "player titles" as opposed to including those with "coaching titles" too?

To clarify, what I mean is for lichess to include coaches that may be untitled as players, but have official coaching titles such as FIDE Senior Trainer (FST), FIDE Trainer (FT), FIDE Instructor (FI), or National Instructor (NI).

The requirements for these titles are not easy to attain. Coaches need to complete a training seminar and pass the resulting exam, have specific coaching experience (number of years coaching, achievements of students etc.), and also have a minimum rating (FST needs 2450, FT need 2300, FI needs 2000, and NI needs 1700).

So why should we introduce these coaching titles as acceptable lichess.org coaches?

To me, coaching in chess is far more than just the ability to play good chess. Coaching requires experience, the ability to teach well, and the ability to inspire a student to reach new heights.

For myself, I am a FIDE Instructor, with an ELO of 2002 (at the time of getting passing my FIDE Trainer seminar). I have 7 years of experience coaching, and my best students are now playing stronger than I am (for instance, I have a 13 year old student who is playing at 2700 online!).

So my point is that there are experienced coaches that don't get an opportunity to spread their knowledge and skills, just because they don't have a "player title", which to me as a coach, is not a requirement to raise the game of many of the players that are looking for coaching!

Aside from introducing the coaching titles to the list of coaches on lichess, I'd also hope that the "filters" for the coaches can be improved? Currently, there is "Last Login, Lichess Rating, and Alphabetical" in order to filter the coaches - which isn't very helpful to find the coach that's best for you?

Perhaps filters could include "filter by title", "filter by FIDE rating", "filter by hourly rate" - which would also encourage coaches to be upfront about their rates.

Thank you for taking the time to read my proposal, and let me know what you guys think! If you're in support of this post, do leave an upvote to encourage lichess to consider making these changes!

Cheers,
Michael
#2
It's mostly a human resource issue. It's not clear if Lichess has the capacity to review all the applications that you would expect
from a more open system. FIDE trainer titles, is really just similarly weird/arbitrary as any other titles. Tons of coachers and chess teachers do not have either of them, bit might be very experienced teachers.

My own dream solution would be something like the National Federations or Chess Clubs maintaining a list of teachers and their Lichess usernames. Then Lichess would pull from that and not have to do the verification of ID's or handling fraud / lack of payment disputes.

Point is, the current limit is really a logistical limit, more then anything. We already verify FIDE titles, so it's easier to tie it to that.
#3
@TBest

I don't believe that the titles are arbitrary if websites like lichess.org were to make use of them? If they did, then chess coaches and chess teachers below the 2200 rating would have a path that they could take to get noticed and accredited for their coaching abilities.

I also would love to have a "National Federations of Chess Clubs" type list for lichess to use, but since there isn't something like this, I feel like using FIDE's coaching titles is the next best thing!

The coaching titles are listed on a player's FIDE profile, just like how the playing titles are listed on a player's FIDE profile. So I'm not sure why it would take any more time or effort to verify a coaching title instead?

Hope this can be looked into further,
Michael
#4
>chess coaches and chess teachers below the 2200 rating

I mean, CM requires 2000 ( think there might even be exceptions to that, at least historically. And I guess there might be "easier" NM's In some places too). So really if you move from CM to NI, you move the minimum fide rating from 2000 to 1700, which in both cases is kinda a random rating threshold. Random seems plenty fair, given the recent FIDE rating boost. With FIDE minimum at 1400: lowering it to 1700 opens up significantly.

If you lower the rating, you likely increase the number of applications. With more coaches, you probably also get more disputes (ie. I paid the coach and never got the lesson etc.) It's hard to say how much of course, but as I mentioned, the main concerns are logistical. And if you open it up, it's hard to close it down again. We generally do think that a title does should not be a requirement for coaching, but for practical reasons it currently is. I don't really think this will change in the short-term, so having Clubs or National Federations focus more on online coaching is the path forward, if you ask me.
#6
@sheckley666 Check out handbook.fide.com/chapter/B012024 I know FIDE title rules are a) hard to find and b) dense to read.*

0.6.2 For a direct title to be awarded immediately an applicant has to have achieved at some time a minimum rating published or interim (see 1.5.3a), as follows:

GM 2300
WGM 2100
IM 2200
WIM 2000
FM 2100
WFM 1900
CM 2000
WCM 1800

* The handbook handbook.fide.com/ has enough documents for a lifetime.
#8
@TBest said in #4:
> "I mean, CM requires 2000 ( think there might even be exceptions to that, at least historically. And I guess there might be "easier" NM's In some places too). So really if you move from CM to NI, you move the minimum fide rating from 2000 to 1700, which in both cases is kinda a random rating threshold. Random seems plenty fair, given the recent FIDE rating boost. With FIDE minimum at 1400: lowering it to 1700 opens up significantly."

The majority of CM titles are earnt by rating, not by direct titles. So this is certainly a 2200 requirement for the majority of players.

@TBest said in #4:
> "If you lower the rating, you likely increase the number of applications. With more coaches, you probably also get more disputes (ie. I paid the coach and never got the lesson etc.) It's hard to say how much of course, but as I mentioned, the main concerns are logistical. And if you open it up, it's hard to close it down again. We generally do think that a title does should not be a requirement for coaching, but for practical reasons it currently is. I don't really think this will change in the short-term, so having Clubs or National Federations focus more on online coaching is the path forward, if you ask me."

Sorry, but I have no idea what you're trying to suggest with the example you give in your second sentence. If there were to be an increase in the number of quality coaches (with NI and FI titles), why on earth would that potentially increase the number of coaches that are actually looking to scam students??

I also still don't understand why your "main concerns are logistical". As I wrote earlier, the coaching titles are listed on a player's FIDE profile, just like how the playing titles are listed on a player's FIDE profile. So I'm not sure why it would take any more time or effort to verify a coaching title instead?

Can you please elaborate on what aspect of verifying a coaching title is more logistically difficult than verifying a playing title?

Thank you,
Michael
#9
I am not sure what I wrote that is causing you to missunderstand what I am saying. But feels like you are not understanding it and implying things I have not said.

>main concerns are logistical
To put it opposite, there are not really any concerns about the ability to teach. After all, there are tons of teachers that have decades of experience teaching in schools. So the concerns are about the practical way to do it ( ie. see how coach reviews got removed. ) And many of them have no FIDE title ( including the instructor titles). It's easy to say that, yes, we do want people to use Lichess to teach students and there are many features built around that. The problem is " what do we do, if we get 10k* applications".

>Can you please elaborate on what aspect of verifying a coaching title is more logistically difficult than verifying a playing title?

I don't think I ever made this claim, so not sure where you got that from. FIDE titles are done so that we can have things like Titled Arena, show the title in various places, put Simuls on the homepage, and probably many other features. We need to verify them, regardless of coaching. So in practice, the title form : lichess.org/help/master : just has a checkbox "Do you want a coach profile" and maybe some back and forth. Making and reviewing a new form is probably always going to be more work then the current checkbox. But the big unknown is " how many would send an application " and " how much extra time will go into replying to emails about this coach is a scammer ( or other misbehavior reports) ". The latter already takes time, so simply, if there are more coachers then we should expect it to happen more often. ( Also : Note, I am not saying that they ARE looking to scam students, just that we will have more CLAIMS like this. We get claims about the opposite too, " this student never paid me" etc. Since the disputes often involve money, it's reasonable that they want Lichess to look into it. But very difficult for Lichess to figure out what actually happened. )

>The majority of CM titles are earnt by rating, not by direct titles. So this is certainly a 2200 requirement for the majority of players.

But this is not about the majority, right? The majority of FIDE instructor titles probably already have a "playing" title. It's really about lowering the minimum requirement. The current lowest open FIDE title is CM, which needs 2000 fide. Or a NM title, and NM is in many places about 2000 FIDE. And yes, not all places have NM titles, nor do everyone have the chance to play in Direct Title events. But the same problems applies to all things FIDE, not everyone has FIDE instructor seminar that they can attend. In practice, money becomes an important factor, when the goal is that money should not be a factor.

Which is why, my dream #2 is that clubs or National Federations just publishes on their websites with the usernames of their online accounts. Basically remove the awkward middle step of FIDE. And have an entity ( club or federation) having reputation invested into it.

*Or whatever number it ends up being. It's hard to know the amount. And yes, some of the apps will probably be fake.
#10
@TBest

I'm glad to hear that you weren't suggesting that coaches with coaching titles would have a higher chance of scamming students than coaches with playing titles. I just didn't think you could be making the argument that "when you increase the number of X, you will increase the possibility of Y" — despite X having no real relation to Y.

Because you could literally say this about anything. For instance, "we should not have more doctors in the world, because more doctors would increase the chances of having more psychopathic doctors, which is bad, so having more doctors is also bad." Following this line of logic, the optimal solution to reduce coaches that scam students would then be to get rid of Lichess coaches altogether, in order to reduce the number of instances of students getting scammed to 0...

So, obviously, there is a balance to 'how much good' we can get from a coaches page vs 'how much inconvenience' that is caused to the Lichess team from very rare cases like a verified coach scamming someone.

To me, increasing the number of quality coaches (that have accredited coaching titles) will massively outweigh the inconvenience caused by its addition to Lichess. But I'll come back to this later. //

So, if I understand correctly, your main concern with adding coaches with coaching titles is "what if we get too many applications to handle?"

Well, firstly, as you said yourself, that: "The majority of FIDE instructor titles probably already have a 'playing' title."

So in reality, there will only be an influx of players with FI and NI titles.

Now, unfortunately, FIDE doesn't reveal exact numbers of players with these coaching titles. But how many of these coaches would need to sign up before it stops being a net positive, and starts being a net inconvenience to the Lichess team? 100 signups? 1000 signups? 0 signups?

Because, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have the feeling you don't think any signups of NI/FI will improve the Lichess coaching page, since "the rating of a coach is arbitrary, and lowering to 1700 instead of '2000' makes no difference." But to me, the point is that NI and FI are qualified coaches. They have the training and skills to teach chess. And given that a huge demographic on Lichess are of the beginner to intermediate level, the chess level of an NI or FI will be strong enough to teach them chess, and do a really great job of it!

I do agree with you that there will still be a significant number of quality coaches that will miss out due to the fact that they have neither playing titles nor coaching titles, but my point is, that if they're passionate enough to grow their coaching profile by becoming a Lichess coach, they now have an easier path to do so (by getting a coaching title). And we should try to make this an easier path for them, since the main goal with a coaching page should be to bring quality coaches to Lichess?

So to summarise, my point is that there are quality chess teachers that you are missing out on by not accepting coaching titles as a form of verification to join Lichess coaches. And for any teachers without playing/coaching titles that are passionate enough to coach chess via Lichess, they now have a path to become accredited, get the coaching title, and then have the capacity to join Lichess as a coach.

I don't agree that it's logistically much more difficult to add coaches with coaching titles because a) an influx of FI or NI will highly unlikely reach numbers of "10k", which also means any increase in the amount of inconvenience (e.g. number of scams) will be miniscule, and b) coaching titles are as easy to verify as playing titles via their FIDE profile.

So what I really think it comes down to is: is it worth it?

For comparison, all the time and effort spent to upgrade the Lichess broadcast page must have been a massive 'inconvenience' to the Lichess team — but is it worth it? The answer is obviously yes.

And to me, to bring in more quality coaches who have training and experience, is clearly worth it too.

But I realise that there's little I can probably do now to convince you that this is a net positive proposal, but I at least appreciate the time you've taken to read and address all the points that I've made.

Hope you have a nice rest of the week,
Michael