Time to find a chess coach?
You know how this usually goes.
Your kid has started beating you and it is time to get them a real teacher. Or you have been stuck at 1500 for three years, you know exactly which endgames are costing you the points, and you want somebody to drill them with you. So you ask in a WhatsApp group. Someone forwards a number. The number belongs to a coach who stopped taking students last year, or who teaches in a city you don't live in, or who won't tell you the fee until you have sat through a trial class and feel rude saying no.
That is the entire process. A rumour, a phone number, and hope.
ChessDial was built to replace it with something you can actually search. Every listing is verified - their ratings, achievements, notable students. As of 8 October, 103 listings are live — 93 verified coaches and 10 academies — and in the last five weeks people have opened those profiles close to twenty-five thousand times.
What finding a coach looks like now
You open the site and you narrow it down.
By where you are: There are coaches in 55 cities across 26 states and 5 countries - India, Netherlands, Brazil, UAE and Czechia). And since 91 of the 93 coaches teach online, no mattery where you are - there's a good for you listed on ChessDial!
By language: Coaches here teach in fourteen different languages! English and Hindi mostly, then Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, down to the single coaches teaching in Malayalam, Urdu, Kumauni, German, Russian and Czech. If your eight-year-old follows an idea faster in Marathi than in English, you can filter for exactly that.
By your level: 75 coaches take absolute beginners - trying to learn rules of the game. 86 coaches work with improvers - building their foundations, 78 with club players, 39 with advanced players, and 13 will train you if you are already a master.
By group size: 90 coaches teach one-on-one, 76 take small groups, 41 run in large groups, and 34 can travel to your home.
And then the part that changes the whole experience: you see the fee before you contact anyone. No trial class first. No negotiation at the end. No discovering that it costs three times what you had in mind after you have already taken up someone's evening.
It costs less than you are probably assuming!
This is the question everyone actually has first, so here it is with no runaround.
Of the 90 coaches who price in rupees, sixty start under ₹1,000 an hour. Sixteen start under ₹500. The median across the platform is ₹800.
At the other end, ten coaches start at ₹2,000 or more — and they are exactly who you would expect: eight of those ten hold a playing title, and eight are rated above 2000. If that is what you want, it is on the shelf. If what you want is a patient teacher for a nine-year-old who has just worked out how the knight moves, that is on the shelf too, and it costs less than a tank of petrol.
A handful of coaches price in other currencies — €25 an hour in the Netherlands, $16 in the Czech Republic, $80 for a Grandmaster in Brazil. Everyone sets their own rate, in their own money.
Complete range of coaching experience!
Thirty-one of the 93 coaches hold a FIDE or national title. Seventy-five list a FIDE rating, and the median is 1645 — which is a lovely place for a coach to be. Strong enough to have played serious tournament chess. Close enough to still remember, in their body, what being 1200 felt like.
Above them it climbs: fourteen coaches rated 2000 or better, ten above 2200, five above 2400.
But the list is not just ratings. Fourteen coaches have been teaching for more than ten years. Fourteen have taught more than a thousand students each.
Special mention: the Grandmasters and the International Masters
We already have 3 GMs and 4 IMs listed on our platform — all verified, all setting their own fee, all taking students right now. Which is worth sitting with for a second: you can book a lesson with a Grandmaster this week, from your living room, and you already know what it costs!
The Grandmasters
GM Aronyak Ghosh — FIDE 2546, Kolkata. The highest-rated player on the platform, with Round 2 qualification at the FIDE World Cup 2025 listed on the profile. ₹4,000–5,000 an hour, in English and Hindi.
GM Alexandr Fier — FIDE 2537, Lages, Brazil. A five-time Brazilian champion, and the clearest proof that this is not an India-only project. $80 an hour, and already taking bookings through the platform.
GM Karthikeyan Pandian — FIDE 2283, Sholinganallur. Commonwealth Open winner in 2018, and the most seasoned teacher of the three: 11–20 years of coaching and over a thousand students taught. ₹2,500 an hour, in English and Tamil — online, in person, or travelling to you.
The International Masters
IM Neelash Saha — FIDE 2478, Kolkata. Qualified for and played the World Cup 2025, and the most-booked titled coach on the platform. ₹2,500–3,500 an hour.
IM Aradhya Garg — FIDE 2430, Delhi. Earned the IM title in 2024, and it's one of the most-viewed of these seven profiles. ₹2,000–3,000 an hour.
IM Deboushnik De — FIDE 2430, Siliguri. Six to ten years of coaching and more than a thousand students taught — the deepest teaching record of the four. ₹3,500–5,000 an hour.
IM Garv Gaur — FIDE 2349, Faridabad. The newest of the group, one to two years in. ₹3,099 an hour.
Just behind them: three FIDE Masters — FM Arnav Maheshwari (2362, Chennai), FM Priyanshu Patil (2250, Nagpur) and FM Sauravh Khherdekar (2035, Mumbai, twenty-plus years of coaching) — and two Candidate Masters, CM Vinod Kumar Sharma (2101, Raipur) and CM Anurag Jaiswal (1849, Kolkata).
It is already working
Forty bookings have gone through, from 27 different students to 22 different coaches, and those students booked from five countries — India, Canada, Australia, the United States and Norway. Fifteen of those lessons are already done and dusted.
Small numbers. We will say so plainly rather than dress them up. But look at who is getting booked.
Priyanka Ved coaches from Mumbai, is rated 1887, and has the single most-viewed profile on ChessDial.
A finished profile, an honest price and a real photograph add real value to a coach profile.
Nine students have left reviews so far, across 8 different coach profiles. Every single one is five stars — let's see what they had to say about their respective coaches.
If you would rather join an academy
Ten academies are verified and live, for anyone who wants a structure and a cohort instead of one-to-one sessions.
Silver Knights Chess Club draws the most attention of the ten, followed by Kingdom Of Chess, Chess64 Academy and Chess Square by Satendra.
Kingdom Of Chess lists six coaches and more than a thousand students taught. Gurukul Chess Academy has been running for over twenty years. Chess64 Academy lists five coaches; Coimbatore Chess Centre has taught somewhere between 500 and 1,000 students.
If you teach chess, this is your shopfront
Every coach in this article started with the same empty form.
Registration is free! You set your own hourly fee, your own availability, your own teaching modes, the levels you actually want to work with. You keep your students and you keep your rates — ChessDial is where people find you, not a middleman standing between you and your class.
And people are looking. Here is what the last five weeks looked like:
Profiles were getting about 104 views a day through early September. From 20 September onward that became 1,218 a day — close to twelve times the traffic — peaking at 1,848 views in a single day on 27 September. That is roughly twenty-five thousand times somebody opened a coach's page and decided whether to get in touch.
If you want to be one of the pages they stop on, the data is unambiguous about how, and it is not "be the highest rated." It is finishing your profile. Forty-seven of the 93 coaches filled in their achievements section; those coaches average about 60% more profile views than the 46 who left it blank. Fifteen of the twenty most-viewed coaches have achievements filled in.
A real photograph. Results you can point to. An honest fee range. Your languages. Availability that is actually current. That is most of the gap, and it takes an evening.
List yourself at — coach or academy, India or anywhere else.
And if you are the one looking
You do not need a referral. You do not need to know somebody. You do not need to be good yet.
Search by city, rating, language, budget, or simply by whether you want somebody to teach you in person. Every listing has been checked by a human before it went up. Every fee is visible before you say hello.
There are 103 coaches and academies on ChessDial right now, and 101 of them will teach you over a video call this evening. One of them is the right one for you, and finding them should take about four minutes.
Find your coach at now!
All figures are from ChessDial data as of 8 October 2026. ChessDial is a ChessBase India product.
