FM Zisis Tsaknakis

I am a 27-year-old FIDE Master from Greece, active tournament player and chess coach. Alongside chess, I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and work on research projects.
I have been involved with competitive chess for most of my life, both as a player and as a coach. What interests me most is not simply finding the best move, but understanding why a player makes a particular decision and how that decision-making process can be improved.

FIDE Master with a peak classical rating of 2355 and over 20 years of competitive chess experience. I have competed in strong national and international tournaments, including the 2015 World Youth Championship and the 2026 European Individual Championship, and have experience playing against titled players at IM and GM level, including several 2600+ GMs.
My own chess has taught me a lot about practical decision-making, dynamic play, time management and playing under pressure. I actively compete, which means the problems I work on with my students are often the same practical problems I face in my own tournaments. I have also achieved an IM norm. Best results :

• Wins against GM Dobrov, GM Nevednichy (at the same tournament) , GM Zanan, GM Kotronias, GM Ioannidis, GM Kollars (World Team Rapid and Blitz 2025)
• Draws against GM Theodorou, GM Papaioannou (twice) , GM Banikas (twice)
• Won several tournaments in Greece

I have nearly 10 years of experience coaching competitive players, both individually and in groups.
One of my long-term students improved from approximately 1650 to over 2100 during our 3 years of work together. More importantly, he learned how to study independently, build a repertoire that suited his style, analyse his own games and question my analysis rather than simply accept it.
I have also worked with groups of ambitious tournament players, helping players around 1400–1800 progress toward 2000 level and stronger players around 1900–2100 move toward the 2200+ range.
My main goal as a coach is not to make a student dependent on lessons, but eventually capable of diagnosing and improving their own chess.

Outside chess, I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and have experience in academic research. This has strongly influenced the way I approach chess improvement: form a hypothesis, identify the real source of an error, test a solution and adapt when the evidence disagrees with you.
I also co-founded "White Tower Chess Academy" in Greece in 2019. The club continues to operate today and fields a competitive team in the Greek League.

My strongest area as a coach is identifying the real bottleneck behind a player's results.
Many ambitious players already know a lot of chess. Their problem is often converting that knowledge into good decisions during tournament games. I focus especially on:
• recognizing critical moments
• knowing when to calculate deeply and when to trust understanding
• practical decision-making and time management
• dynamic play and understanding when threats can be ignored or countered
• positional evaluation and identifying what actually matters in a position
• analysing recurring thinking-process mistakes from the student's own games
I also put a lot of emphasis on a player's strengths. Improvement is not only about fixing weaknesses — the player's strongest weapon should become something they understand and can rely on under pressure.

I start with diagnosis, not prescription.
Before deciding what a student should study, I analyse their recent classical games and look for two things: their strongest practical weapon and the bottleneck that is currently costing them the most. During our sessions, I also ask the student to explain what they were thinking at critical moments, because the move itself often tells only half the story.
We then focus on one major problem at a time. I prefer deep work on a single recurring issue rather than giving the student ten different things to study simultaneously.
A typical coaching week includes:
• a 2-hour private coaching session
• analysis of the student's tournament games
• personalized training material based on the current focus
• exercises and model games selected specifically for the student
• feedback and questions throughout the week
After a training period, we return to the student's new games (or test positions that are connected to the topic) and test whether the problem is actually changing in practice. If it is, we move to the next bottleneck.
The long-term goal is independence: I want my students to understand their own chess well enough that eventually they can identify and solve many of these problems themselves.