The strongest player available is usually not the right coach, and a coach's own rating tells you almost nothing about whether your child will improve. What matters is whether they can find the one thing your child is doing wrong and make them want to fix it.
Any coach rated a few hundred points above your child can see everything wrong with their play. Beyond that, extra strength adds nothing until a child is genuinely advanced. A patient 1800 who teaches well will take a beginner further than a distracted master.
Ask how they decide what to work on — a good answer involves looking at the child's own games, a poor one is a fixed syllabus. Ask what homework looks like between sessions, because that is where improvement actually happens. Ask what they do when a student stops enjoying it. And ask how you will know it is working, in terms that are not just the rating.
Rates vary enormously by region and level, from modest for a strong club player to substantial for a titled coach. What should be consistent is clarity: a stated rate, a stated length, a stated cancellation policy. Vagueness about money predicts vagueness about everything else.
Under roughly 1000, a good group class is often better — children learn from each other's mistakes and get more games in. One-to-one earns its cost once a child has specific weaknesses that a group cannot address, which is usually later than parents expect.
A coach who only plays games against your child and calls it a lesson. One who cannot tell you what was covered last week. One who talks about their own career more than your child's games. One who promises a rating by a date. And one who makes a child feel stupid — that ends more chess careers than any opening they will ever be taught.
Your child can tell you what they are working on. They lose in different ways than they used to. They want to play. The rating may not have moved at all, and that is genuinely fine at three months.
Once a week with real practice in between beats twice a week with none. Frequency matters less than whether anything happens between sessions.
Only at an advanced level. For a beginner or an improver, teaching ability matters far more than a title.
Yes, and often better — a shared board, engine analysis and a recording of the session are all easier online than across a table.
Expect changes in how they play within a month or two, and changes in results within about six months. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
Everything above is the practical layer — the part that decides whether a club survives, whether a child keeps playing, and whether a coaching business pays. It is also the part almost nobody writes about, because it is less interesting than opening theory and far more useful.
If you are teaching, the two things that move the needle fastest are structure and measurement: a session that has the same shape every week, and a number each student can watch go up. Neither requires you to be a strong player. Both require you to be organised, and organisation is the thing you can actually control.
The rest of this Library covers the chess itself — twenty-one openings written from both sides, seven complete guides to tactics, endgames, checkmate patterns and strategy, and twenty variants with a guide each. All of it is free, and all of it is playable on a live board, which matters more than reading it.
Grandmaster Gains gives coaches a private classroom — your roster, your students, their ratings, and a dashboard showing who actually practised between sessions.
♔ See the trainer classroom197 interactive lessons, 20 variants and a full engine, free in the browser with no sign-up. Open the Academy or browse the complete guides.