My name is Valery Filippov. I’m an International Grandmaster, and I’ve been coaching chess for over twenty years now. Chess has been with me for as long as I can remember-first as a game I just loved, then as a serious sport, and now as my daily work.

I didn’t write this to give another lesson on the Caro-Kann or how to annotate a game. I wanted to talk about something else: coaching as a profession. What does it actually mean to do this for a living? Can you feed a family on it? Do you have to be a 2700 player to be any good at it? And is this job even going to be around in ten years?

If you’re standing at a crossroads and wondering what’s next, maybe my story will give you something to think about.

When I started playing chess, everything was quite different. There were no online lessons, of course. If you wanted a coach, you normally had to find someone who lived in your city. You went to a chess club or a local chess school and worked with whoever was available there. In a big city you could have several good coaches to choose from. In a small town, sometimes you had no choice at all. There might be one decent coach nearby, or there might be nobody.

Today, a student in California can have regular lessons with a coach living somewhere in Europe. A talented child from a small town can work with a grandmaster every week. Geography, which used to be one of the biggest limitations in chess education, has almost disappeared.

The chess market itself has changed as well. Online platforms have brought millions of new players into the game. We now have chess streamers, bloggers, interactive courses, training applications and an almost unlimited amount of free educational material.

This naturally raises a question: does chess coaching still have a future as a profession? I believe it does. But the profession itself is becoming very different.

Where You Live Used to Matter. Now It Doesn’t.

Twenty years ago, your zip code pretty much decided how many students you’d get. That was it.

I remember grandmasters living in small towns – really strong players, some of them- who were lucky to give three or four lessons a week. Not because they weren’t good. Because there wasn’t anyone around who wanted to pay for chess. The local chess club had maybe ten people, and half of them were retired guys who played for fun on Thursdays.

So you either moved to Moscow or St. Petersburg, or you accepted that chess coaching would stay a side job forever.

Then the internet showed up. Not right away-it took a few years for things like Skype and chess platforms to become reliable. But once they did? Everything flipped.

Now I can wake up in the morning and teach a kid in Texas, have lunch, then work with an adult student in London, and finish the day with someone in Sydney. No airports. No jet lag. Just a laptop, a decent connection, and a board on the screen.

That’s not a small change. That’s the single biggest shift I’ve seen in this profession since I started playing.

Students win too, obviously. They’re not stuck with whoever happens to live within driving distance. They can pick a coach who actually fits their style, their level, their personality. And coaches like me-we’re not begging for scraps in our local market anymore. The whole world is open.

Honestly, I can’t imagine going back. And I don’t think anyone would want to.

Interest in Chess Has Not Disappeared

You sometimes hear the argument that the recent popularity of chess was temporary. The pandemic, The Queen’s Gambit, the growth of Chess.com, Twitch and YouTube certainly gave the game an enormous boost. But I think something more important happened during that period: many of the people who discovered chess stayed. The adult amateur market in particular has changed significantly.

In the past, a chess coach was often seen as someone who trained talented children and prepared them for tournaments. Today, a large percentage of students are adults, and their motivations can be completely different.

One player wants to reach 2000. Another simply wants to finally beat a friend who has been winning their games for the last five years. Someone else discovers chess after the age of forty and wants to understand the game on a deeper level. Another player returns after not touching a chessboard for twenty years. I consider this an important development. You no longer need to dream about becoming a professional chess player to have a good reason to work with a coach.

Why Do You Need a Coach When Everything Is Already Online?

This is probably the most important question when discussing the future of chess coaching. Thousands of hours of chess videos are available for free. We have books, online courses, databases, engines and websites containing almost endless collections of exercises.

A computer can identify in a few seconds an error that might once have taken a strong player an hour to discover. At first, it seems logical to assume that coaches will gradually become unnecessary. What I see in practice is almost the opposite. There is too much information.

A 1400-rated player might be learning a new opening, watching a video about the Carlsbad structure, solving difficult tactical exercises, reading an endgame book and analyzing every game with an engine – all at the same time. He may spend time on chess almost every day and then discover six months later that his rating has barely moved. The problem is no longer access to information. The real problem is understanding which information a particular player actually needs at this particular moment. I believe this is becoming one of the most important responsibilities of a modern chess coach.

Playing Strength Alone Does Not Make a Good Coach

A strong chess player and a strong chess coach are not necessarily the same thing. A player can have a 2500 rating and still struggle to explain to someone rated 1200 why that student keeps ending up in terrible positions. In fact, very strong players sometimes have difficulty noticing elementary problems. Many chess decisions have become automatic for them. They no longer remember what it was like not to understand those things.

For me, coaching starts with diagnosis. Why is this person not improving? Does he calculate variations poorly? Does he play too quickly? Does he misunderstand the pawn structures he regularly gets? Is time trouble ruining otherwise good games? Does he know plenty of opening theory but become completely lost as soon as the memorized moves end?

Two players with exactly the same rating can have completely different reasons for losing games. This is why I have never believed very much in universal training programs. If two 1600-rated students come to me, there is absolutely no reason to assume that they should study the same material.

Artificial Intelligence Will Change Coaching Too

It would be strange to discuss the future of chess coaching without talking about artificial intelligence.

Chess was actually one of the first fields in which people had to become comfortable with the fact that computers could outperform us. Professional players stopped trying to compete with the strongest engines a long time ago. Chess coaches did not disappear because of it. I expect something similar to happen with the next generation of AI tools.

Technology will become much better at analyzing games, recognizing a player’s recurring mistakes and automatically suggesting exercises. In a few years, automated game analysis may be far more useful than it is today. But there is still an enormous difference between saying, “You should have played 18…Re8 here,” and understanding why the student failed to find 18…Re8.

Perhaps the student evaluated the position incorrectly. Perhaps he was afraid of an attack that was not actually dangerous. Perhaps he spent ten minutes calculating an irrelevant variation and then made the mistake because he had almost no time left.

The engine sees the result of the decision. A coach needs to understand the process that produced it. For this reason, I see new technology primarily as another tool available to coaches rather than something that will simply replace them.

Can You Actually Pay the Bills with This?

Short answer: yes. But don’t quit your day job the moment you hit 2200.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you start coaching. Being a strong player-even a very strong player- doesn’t automatically fill your calendar. I’ve seen titled players with impressive ratings struggle to get five students a week. And I’ve seen 2000-rated coaches with waiting lists.

Why? Because playing chess and teaching chess are two different skills. But that’s not even the main issue anymore.

What really catches people off guard is everything that isn’t teaching. You’re not just a coach. You’re a receptionist, an accountant, a marketer, and a tech support person all rolled into one. You build your profile on a platform. You reply to inquiries at weird hours because your potential student is in a different time zone. You juggle schedules, chase payments, ask for reviews, and somehow find time to actually prepare lessons.

Nobody prepares you for that. I certainly wasn’t.

The downside is obvious – there’s no safety net. No guaranteed paycheck on the first of the month. Some months are great. Some months you look at your calendar and think, “Well, that’s not enough.”

But here’s the upside that makes it worth it: there’s no cap either. Nobody tells you how much you can earn. If you’re good at what you do, if you build a name for yourself, if students enjoy working with you and tell their friends-you can absolutely build a real career out of this. Especially now, when your students can be anywhere in the world.

I won’t lie to you and say it’s easy. It’s not. But it’s possible. And for me, that’s enough.

Do You Need to Be a Grandmaster?

No. My answer is definitely no.

You may be surprised, but 99% of your potential students will be complete beginners or simply amateur chess players without any serious tournament ambitions. Their goal will often be nothing more than improving their online rating on Chess.com. And to help them do that, you don’t need many years of competitive chess experience.

If, for example, you already have a 1600 rating on Chess.com, you can confidently start teaching students like these. Believe me, your chess knowledge will be enough. What matters much more is your ability to explain the material clearly and present it in a way your student can actually understand.

And by the way, most likely around 90% of your students will be adults rather than children. In recent years, chess has become extremely popular among adults, and I see more and more interesting students with completely different backgrounds coming into the game.

The Main Competition Will Not Be Coaches Against Computers

I expect competition between chess coaches to become stronger over the next few years.

Online teaching did not only open the international market to students. It opened the same market to thousands of coaches from around the world.

A student can now spend ten minutes online and find dozens of potential teachers. Because of that, saying “I am a Candidate Master” – or even “I am an International Master” – is no longer enough on its own. Students want to know what you can actually do for them.

Some coaches specialize in children. Others are particularly good with adult beginners. Some work with talented juniors who want to become professional players. Another coach may specialize in helping experienced club players make the jump from 1800 to 2000. I think specialization will become increasingly important. Trying to be the perfect coach for everyone is probably not a realistic strategy anymore.

So, Is Chess Coaching Worth Pursuing as a Career?

If someone sees chess coaching simply as an easy way to make money from a high rating, I would not recommend it. Teaching requires patience.

Sometimes you have to explain the same chess idea five times in five completely different ways before it finally becomes clear. Sometimes a student continues making the same mistake for months. And sometimes the real result of your work does not become visible until a year later.

But if you genuinely enjoy explaining chess and watching other people improve, there are more opportunities today than there have ever been before.

You can live in Bali and teach a student in New York. You can work exclusively with adult players or devote your career to talented children. You can teach private lessons, create courses or combine several different forms of coaching.

For these reasons, I believe chess coaching remains a promising profession. Its future, however, is not simply about taking the traditional chess lesson and moving it to Zoom.

A successful coach of the future will need to combine chess knowledge, teaching ability and modern technology. He will need to identify the real causes behind a student’s mistakes, separate useful material from the enormous amount of noise online, and build training around the individual rather than around a standard program.

Chess engines have been stronger than every human coach in the world for many years. Technology will become even stronger in the future. But most students are not looking for someone who can simply show them the best move. They need someone who can help them understand why they did not find it themselves.

**Valery Filippov**
International Grandmaster and Chess Coach