ChessDial is live: find your coach, or find your students!

The question behind the site

ChessBase India has spent years covering Indian chess — its players, its tournaments, and the coaches who quietly do the work behind both. In all that time, one request has never stopped arriving. It comes from parents in WhatsApp groups, from adults picking the game back up at 34, from players who have just crossed 1600 and realised they have outgrown whoever got them there.

The honest answer, until now, was word of mouth. And word of mouth has a radius. A very good coach two neighbourhoods away is invisible to you if nobody in your circle happens to know them. A coach who has taken three students past 2000 has no way of saying so to the one student searching for exactly that.

ChessDial closes that gap. It is not a list we scraped together from somewhere — every profile on it was submitted by the coach or the academy themselves, and read by someone on our side before a single student could see it.

For students: start with where you are

Most directories open with a search box and a wall of results. ChessDial opens by asking one thing: what level are you at?

There are six answers — Beginner (unrated, under ~800), Improver (~800–1200), Club player (~1200–1600), Advanced (~1600–2000), Master level (~2000+), and Explore all for anyone who would rather not place themselves on the ladder yet. Tap one, and you are already looking at results.

That question comes first for a reason. Coaches tell us which levels they teach, and those ranges are real limits, honestly stated. One coach on the site writes plainly in his profile that he is experienced up to about 1600 and has only minimal experience above it. That is exactly the kind of thing you want to know before you pay anybody, and exactly the kind of thing a ranked list of “top coaches” would bury.

On the right of the homepage runs a quiet feed of recent bookings — first names partly masked, city and date shown — so you can see the site is actually being used.

Narrowing it down

Thirty-five coaches for a club-level player. Every card carries the fee range, the FIDE rating, the levels taught, the hours, the languages and the demo price — before you click anything.

Above the results sit the two switches that change the search most: mode (online, in person, or either) and location. Choose in-person and ChessDial searches around your pin, within a radius you set. Choose online and distance stops mattering entirely — a coach in Shillong is as available to you as one in your own pincode.

Results can be sorted by best match, by rating, by price low-to-high, or by FIDE rating strongest-first. There is no paid placement on ChessDial. No coach can buy their way up this list.

The filter column is where the search gets specific:

• Hourly rate — a range slider, so you can set what you can actually afford

• Coach rating — 4.5★ and above, 4.0★ and above, or new coaches

• Coach strength — titled (GM/IM/FM), FIDE 2000+, or simply FIDE-rated

• Language — 21 of them, from Marathi and Bengali to Malayalam, Urdu and Punjabi

• Days and timing — weekdays or weekends, and morning, afternoon, evening, night or late-night

• Session format — one-on-one, small group (2–5) or big group (5+)

• Venue — at the coach’s place, they visit you, or online

One detail in there is worth pointing out. The timing filter resolves in your local time, not the coach’s. If you are in Dubai and you ask for evening slots, you get coaches who are free in your evening — the conversion happens behind the scenes, so you never have to do the arithmetic yourself.

What a profile actually tells you

The top of a coach profile: the blue tick, the FIDE rating, the levels taught, the languages, and other important details.

Two marks on that header are worth understanding, because they mean different things.

The blue tick means the coach sent us a government ID and the name on it matches the name on the profile. It is a statement about who they are — not a judgement on how well they teach. The FIDE pill is a live link: click it and you land on that player’s official FIDE profile, so you can check the rating yourself rather than take the site’s word for it.

The whole page: the coach’s own description, achievements, notable students, reviews, fee, and an approximate area.

Notable students, with their FIDE IDs. The “Verified” mark appears only when the student has confirmed the claim themselves, through a single-use link and an ID check. Anything the student has not confirmed is labelled “Unverified” on the page rather than quietly presented as fact — a coach cannot simply attach a strong player’s name to their profile.

Reviews come from people who connected through the site. There is no way to post one without a booking behind it.

That last constraint is the point of the whole ratings system. A rating on ChessDial can only be left by someone who booked and completed a session through ChessDial. It means new coaches genuinely show as New rather than mysteriously starting at 4.8 stars — and it means the ratings that do appear are worth reading.

How you actually reach a coach

Contact details are shared once you book a demo — and the profile shows how many demos this coach has taken.

Here is where ChessDial works differently from a plain directory, and it is worth being precise about it.

Phone numbers are not published on profiles. In India, a student reaches a coach by booking a paid demo session, and paying for it is what unlocks the coach’s WhatsApp number. The coach sets the fee they want for that demo, from ₹99 up to ₹9,999.

The booking page states the split, the refund terms and the deadlines up front, before you pay anything.

The split is shown to you on that page, not buried in a policy document. On a ₹499 demo, ₹449 goes to the coach and ₹50 is ChessDial’s platform fee. Only that platform fee is non-refundable — it is what unlocks the contact, which cannot be un-shared. The session fee is fully refundable.

The protections are just as plainly stated:

• The coach should arrange your session within 7 days. If they do not, or they do not show up, you can raise an issue and get the full session fee back — up to 14 days after booking.

• If a coach never responds at all, sending feedback on ChessDial, or writing to support@chessbase.in gets you the full amount back, platform fee included — and the listing comes down.

• You contact the coach directly to agree a time. ChessDial is not a calendar app and does not sit in the middle of your lessons.

There is one more piece of deliberate restraint here. Coaches who teach in person show an approximate area on a map, never an exact address. You agree on a venue between yourselves once you have connected.

Outside India, contacting a coach is free for now.

Academies are on it too

An academy profile: the coaches on the roster, each branch as its own pin, one profile for the whole organisation.

An academy is not just a coach with a bigger name, so it does not get a coach’s profile. An academy registers once and gets every branch on the map, its whole roster of coaches listed under it, and its programmes and fees in one place. A student books a demo at the branch they picked, and that booking unlocks that branch.

It is built for the phone first

The same six level cards, the same search, the same profile — sized for the device most students will actually use.

For coaches and academies: listing is free

Two doors. One person teaching under their own name, or an organisation with a roster.

If you teach chess, ChessDial exists to put you in front of students who are searching for exactly what you offer — and it costs nothing to be there.

The difference between the two, side by side.

The form takes about ten minutes, and you can save it and come back. You fill in your rating and titles, what you charge, how you teach — online, in person, or both — the levels you take on, the languages you teach in, and the hours you are actually free. If you would rather screen enquiries than take bookings straight away, you can switch to requests-only at any time.

What happens after you submit

Nothing goes live automatically. A person at ChessBase India reads every profile — and every later edit — before students can see it.

This is the part we would most like coaches to know about. Your profile joins a review queue and a human being reads it: credentials, fees, location, the lot. Every later edit goes through the same queue. It means your listing takes a little time to appear. It also means that when a student is looking at the site, they are looking at something that was checked.

Send us a government ID on top of that, and your profile carries the blue tick. For an academy, a registration document does the same job.

The demo fee is the only place money touches the product — and it is paid out to you.

Once you are live, students find you through the same search everyone else uses. No ads, no bidding for position. When one books a demo with you, you get their phone number, their FIDE details if they have them, and a note about what they are looking for — and the demo fee lands in your account.

Here is what you keep at each tier:

You pick the tier. After the demo, whatever you and the student agree on — rates, schedule, format — is between the two of you. ChessDial does not take a cut of your teaching.

The three promises the site is built to keep.

How to get listed

1. Go to coach.chessbase.in/onboard and sign in.

2. Choose your door — coach if you teach under your own name, academy if you run a school with a roster of coaches. The same account can hold both.

3. Fill in the profile. Roughly ten minutes; it saves as you go.

4. Optionally send a government ID (or a registration document, for an academy) for the blue tick.

5. Submit. We read it, and you are live.

And if you are looking for a coach

You do not need to register for anything to browse. Open coach.chessbase.in, tap your level, and see who actually teaches it.

Every rating has its coach. We built this so you could find yours.