A patient game,
taught patiently.
My first student walked into my living room in September of 2010. He was seven years old, held a knight in his left hand, and asked, in the most serious voice a seven-year-old can manage, whether a knight could jump over the queen. He could. He did. We began.
Sixteen years later, ChessPure is a small, deliberate academy teaching six hundred students — some in person, most online — and I still teach six of them each week myself. I have learned a great deal about what chess does to a growing mind, and very little of it is advertised by the industry.
We built ChessPure to be the school I couldn’t find for my own students: one with a written curriculum, coaches who compete and therefore teach, and a cap on class sizes that nobody wants to lift. We ask students to commit to a full volume because chess rewards repetition more than revelation. We ask parents to trust the process because results in chess are slow, and then sudden.
Our promise is modest. We will teach your child — or you — to think carefully, lose gracefully, and sometimes, quietly, to win. Welcome to the first issue of what we hope is a long publication.