FM Tamer Karatekin -- Children’s and Scholastic Chess Coach
Tamer Karatekin is a FIDE Master, FIDE Trainer, FIDE School Instructor, and former Turkish National Champion (2000). He drew games against World Champions Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov in simultaneous exhibitions, graduated from MIT EECS and MIT Sloan, and played first board for the MIT chess team. His students have earned medals at major World and European youth and school chess championships. Student achievements · FIDE profile
Tamer founded DeepSeaChess, whose educational curriculum was piloted with 288 first- and second-grade students at a university-affiliated primary school where all students received compulsory weekly chess lessons. The curriculum distinguishes itself through its focus on educational and social-emotional outcomes, rather than only competitive chess mastery, and through its practical design for large classrooms with many students.
For beginners, Tamer recommends enrolling in year-long, weekly online group lessons within a carefully matched small cohort. This affordable and effective program builds strong chess foundations, supports the broader educational benefits of regular chess practice, and can prepare interested students for competitive scholastic play.
For ambitious scholastic players who already have a coach, Tamer can serve as a secondary performance coach alongside the student’s regular coach, supporting tournament preparation, game analysis, strategic planning, and performance at major competitions. Families should contact him at least three months before their target tournament.
In addition to being an experienced chess teacher and coach, Tamer has been a leader in international chess-in-education initiatives. He served as technical coordinator of Shatranj.ai, a European Union Erasmus+ Youth project that developed a multilingual curriculum connecting chess history, computational thinking, coding, and artificial intelligence. He presented this work in his TEDxBoston talk, “Chess: Bridging Cultures, Inspiring Artificial Intelligence, and Redefining Education”, and designed the historically inspired and culturally inclusive Sahî chess set.
Tamer is the founder of chesscoding.ai , offering in-person AI coding bootcamps at or near the MIT campus. Students learn Python, computational thinking, classical and modern AI algorithms, and problem-solving through chess and historical board-game challenges. View the bootcamp flyer.
During his time with the Turkish national team, Tamer was coached by World Senior Chess Champion Evgeni Vasiukov. He is also a friend and fellow MIT Sloan alumnus of World Senior Chess Champion Larry Kaufman. For a sample lecture by Tamer, watch “Suli’s Diamond: The Most Mysterious and Challenging Chess Puzzle of All Time”.
Instruction: Cambridge/Boston area and online
Phone/Whatsapp: +16174305047
Email: tamer@deepseachess.com
Websites: DeepSeaChess.com - ChessCoding.ai