But seriously, teaching children gradually became more important to me than my own competitive career. My first student was a 6-year-old boy, whom I taught how to play chess, even though I was only 13 years old at the time. I jumped and clapped together with him with joy when he won his first real chess game in a tournament. Later, I started a free school club, but for a 15-year-old, it was quite challenging. Particularly, managing the children’s behavior and getting them interested about chess were difficult tasks. It took two or three years before I got used to the role, and eventually, the children played more chess than ran around during my lessons. They fell so much in love with chess that the number of my students kept growing, and I had new school clubs, private lessons, and groups. Eventually, I could no longer accept more students.

I started recruiting colleagues, but for them too, managing the groups and making chess interesting for young children was a challenge, just as it had been for me at the beginning. So, I began teaching them game-based methods that I had already proven to be effective.

At 28, I had already developed my own fully refined method for skill development and game-based chess teaching for preschool and elementary school children. A few years later, I had assembled a small team of chess teacher colleagues, and we toured kindergartens and schools in Budapest teaching chess.

I won’t burden you with how much work I put in so that my beloved hobby – teaching chess – could become also a livelihood for my family. Even after the birth of my three children, I continued to move forward with determination. However, let’s jump straight to the year 2020. You surely remember what happened then! Just like in Finland and all over the world, all schools and kindergartens in Hungary were closed due to COVID-19. My 12 teaching colleagues and I suddenly found ourselves without chess-clubs, without job, and without salary…

Although I had tried online teaching before the pandemic, I never believed it would work for children. However, the pandemic forced us to innovate. We had to bring playful and interactive methods to the screen because I refused to teach ‘boringly.’ Fortunately, technology developed alongside us. Zoom and Lichess platforms were of great help, but we also had to develop our own online chessboard to get even the youngest children excited from the very beginning.

A year later, we had 300 students again – later even 400. Online teaching also made it possible to form small groups of children with similar skill levels, as distances were no longer a barrier. Thanks to this, we managed to develop excellent competitive players, and our students won several national championship medals in the past few years!

I moved from Hungary to Finland in 2023 due to political and family reasons. I thought that the developmental benefits of chess would be valuable for children in Finland as well, and that there are competitive chess enthusiasts here too.

I moved to Turku and immediately began promoting this wonderful opportunity, but I faced a few obstacles… Erm, for exmple I didn’t know Finnish! 😀 As a result, I could only teach in English. However, this wasn’t the only challenge. While in Hungary I was known as a chess player since childhood and later as a coach from a young age, with strong connections and a proven track record, I realized that in Finland, no one knew me yet. :O 😀 🙁 Also, my Elo rating is no longer over 2000, like it was in my peak years.

Of course, my professional skills have not diminished, and my teaching experience is still very much active – but here, not many know that yet.

That’s why I am truly grateful to you for clicking on my advertisement or post and reaching out to me. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to introduce myself!

I’ve already overcome one of the obstacles. Thanks to chess, learning has been going well, and in just eight months, I’ve learned to communicate in Finnish. Of course, for long written texts like this, I still use ai assistance, but with the children, we already understand each other excellently in spoken Finnish, and usually, they forgive or correct my language mistakes. Thanks to a Finnish chess coach colleague, I’ve had the opportunity to run a school club in Finnish in Turku, and I’ve also started organizing my own groups.

You are now witnessing the first steps of my online chess school. The first groups, the first children are registering, and reaching them is slow, happening only in small steps. But I am grateful to all the parents of my new students who are giving me the opportunity to introduce myself and giving their children the chance to learn chess in a playful and skill-developing way.

In the coming weeks, I will start an email series where I introduce 5 simple chess games that you can try at home with your child, regardless of whether they are a beginner or a slightly more advanced chess player.

If you want to read more about games, experiences, and children’s chess learning opportunities, subscribe to my newsletter here: https://chessastic.com/uutuskirje/

If you would like your child to learn chess from me, you can already sign up for the first groups on this website: https://chessastic.com/ilmoittautuminen-online-shakkikurssille/