FM Dusan Colovic

I am Dušan Čolović, 51 years old, a FIDE Master from Serbia. I am married and a father of two daughters. I have a vocational education background in the natural sciences and mathematics. I live in a small town in Western Serbia, 150 km away from Belgrade.

I started playing chess at the age of 10, participating in school and youth tournaments and joining a local chess club. As a junior, I was dedicated to chess and quickly became one of the better players in the club. After finishing high school, I met the requirements for the FIDE Master title (crossing the 2300 rating threshold) and decided to pursue chess professionally.

At the age of 33, my life circumstances changed, and I withdrew from professional chess, finding employment in the Health Insurance Fund of the Republic of Serbia. During that time, I played chess less frequently but regularly participated in official team competitions in the country. Since 2019, due to changes in life circumstances once again, I left a secure job in public service and returned to my great love of chess, this time as a online chess coach. This has fulfilled my desire to do what I love in life.

I have been playing chess for over 40 years. Until 1991, I primarily participated in school and youth tournaments and regularly visited the local chess club, where I accumulated valuable chess experience. After that, I began actively playing in open tournaments in the country, providing opportunities to compete with players from abroad and further improve my chess skills. I also regularly participated in team championships with considerable success. Interestingly, I generally achieved better results in team competitions than in individual tournaments.
In 2003, I stopped actively playing chess and limited my chess activities to one or two tournaments per year. In October 2015, I reached my highest rating of 2395 points, but unfortunately, I couldn't surpass the magical threshold of 2400 points for the title of International Master. Nowadays, I rarely play and am mostly dedicated to teaching.

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I am full time chess coach with 5 years teaching experience.

My favorite hobby is computers, especially hardware, so I enjoy staying informed and educating myself about the latest developments in that field.

My teaching of chess is based on my personal experience, and I aim to pass that on to my students. I am a proponent of the classical approach to learning chess. This means we learn chess starting from endgames, then move on to middlegames, and finally study openings. Why do we start with endgames? The answer is quite simple. If we make a mistake in the endgame, we won't have time to correct it later, because there are only a few pieces left on the board. It's much easier to correct mistakes in the opening or middlegame, whereas in the endgame, it is exceptionally difficult.

We start by learning simple endgames, those with a few pieces on the board, and work on basic tactics (combinations with two or three moves). Once we've mastered that, we move on to more complex positions where we have to calculate more variations with a greater number of moves. After that, we focus on studying openings tailored to the student's playing style.

For homework, I always assign a chess study with a tactical element because I believe that tactics should be practiced daily, as chess is essentially tactical. Whether we prefer to play risky (tactical) or calm positions, without tactics, we cannot become good chess players.