IM Erik Kislik

I am a 33-year-old International Master from San Francisco, California. I love to help people learn and improve their chess, so I wrote the book Applying Logic in Chess explaining exactly how I would approach becoming an International Master in chess if I was anywhere from 1000 strength to 2100 strength in chess. My second book, Chess Logic in Practice, discusses common practical situations we find ourselves in during middlegames and how to navigate them using logic. I have posted some YouTube videos that have helpful ideas in them that I wish I had learned when I was starting out in chess. Contact me at imerikkislik@gmail.com if you would like lessons.

I played tournament chess for 9 months prior to age 18, I studied chess very seriously and obtained my first FIDE rating at age 20, and became an International Master just after my 23th birthday. I have won two Grandmaster norm tournaments, and have won 4 International Master category tournaments.

I coached the national champions of Spain, Denmark, Iceland, and Singapore, 3 of whom were Grandmasters.
I have been coaching full-time for 6 years and in my first serious coaching stint, my student, a Grandmaster, won the Danish Championship aided by the opening assistance I gave him during the tournament and chess position evaluation exercises I gave him before the tournament, which improved his positional understanding.
I was ranked the most popular teacher on ICC for 6 months in 2016 and 2017.

I analyze everything deeply and explain things clearly so that all of my students can understand me. I still understand how amateur players think because I had less than a year of chess experience at age 18. I am quite conscientious and collect a lot of useful training material and organize my openings and training material carefully, which is very helpful when coaching players who want to solve exercises, see accompanying examples, and need help learning new openings.

The best way to improve in chess is to play as much as possible, analyze those games as deeply as possible to learn the most you possibly can from them, do chess training that fills in gaps in your chess competence, and then go right back out and play more games and repeat the process. I focus on analyzing my students' games and patching up all areas where they're lagging behind. I have extensive training material that I created myself to give players additional study material if they are very serious about improving.

Cancellations for lessons must be made 24 hours before the lesson time or the full lesson cost is owed. The one exception is to reschedule that lesson within a day.