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I love this, just subscribed. My favorite piece of advice:

“I’ll give you a lesson, a half hour for $20. I have some children that come just to see me once a week and I give them a lesson—$20 for a half hour. And there’s a lot of NYU students that come by, we give them a discount for being students. One hour for 40 bucks.”

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I think (or maybe your choice of quote just accidentally gives the impression) you're interpreting that as making NYU students believe they're getting a deal despite paying the same price as "some children", but actually in the previous paragraph:

> If you want a game, I say one game, five dollars, five minutes.

So the children and NYU Students are both getting a discount (40/hr for both types of student vs 60/hr for non-teaching games). Although I suspect he'd be willing to negotiate to the same 40/hr to play 12x timed 5min games if someone asked.

5min games are up to 10min long - 5min for each player

From what I've gathered (worked with a few good players, but I'm not good), the way to get good is grinding, but specifically known openings and endgames (some version of this is how you get good at anything). The midgame is where the play isn't so robotic. Hopefully anyone paying for lessons is practicing openings on their own (for free).

Yea the middle game is the easy part /s

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