They say that sometimes “you’re in the right place at the right time.” As the editor for the Illinois Chess Association, I was visiting a chess club near my school to interview someone. During our conversation, we discussed my passion for math and the classes I was taking at IMSA. We also talked about my love for chess; while I enjoy playing, I have never been interested in having a coach. To me, chess is a passion and a source of fun, and I have always preferred to grow on my own. Currently, I am a class “A” player, entirely self-taught.

I decided to design, co-develop, and implement a training website to be used while in Uganda at the SOM Chess Academy, featured in the Disney movie "Queen of Katwe", to teach chess and math. I spent countless hours, over several arduous months, creating content, lessons, puzzles, articles, and videos. In total, I incorporated over 2,000 puzzles and lessons for the website, documenting many exercises from the book “Practical Chess Exercises: 600 Lessons from Tactics to Strategy”, creating my own chess puzzles, articles, videos and curriculum. I also incorporated the knowledge I gained while Rev. William Lombardy, Bobby Fischer's coach, and his second, at the World Championship, in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972. He lived with my family, for several months when I was ten years old. He taught me the methods, he trained Bobby Fischer with for part of his training. 

I am now in the process of distributing the web resources to other impoverished areas. My hope is to provide this software to the poorest regions on the planet.

Feel free to reach out to me if interested in acquiring web resources for your use in impoverished areas around the globe.

jacob@coachjacob.info