NM Nick Matta

Hello everyone! I am a 29 year old full time chess instructor residing in New Orleans, LA. Despite my age, I already have longstanding teaching experience. I have taught chess full time now for over 9 years, and I have been teaching in chess clubs since I was a high school student, giving me 15+ years of chess teaching experience already.

It is my belief that chess is best enjoyed as a true student of the game, when we allow our natural curiosity to guide us to new and hopefully stronger ideas. As I teach chess to others across my state, I continue to be active in my own chess study. I have studied with the likes of GM Eltaj Safarli, GM Gregory Kaidanov and IM John Bartholomew and hope to teach my students many of the principles they have helped to instill in me. With their help and my own persistence in study, I have gone from a USCF rating of 1500 to over 2300 in a span of only 5 years.

Thanks to this process, I know very well what my students need to study in order to improve. Many of my students have climbed the rating ladder significantly, often gaining 100+ points rapidly and some even more. In addition to this, it is my hope that I can teach you to be a better student of the game, and to improve your study habits both at the board and in your free time.

I have played chess since I was 5 years old and had a lot of early success as a scholastic chess player. I had a wonderful coach growing up, Alfred Blake Carlin and he helped to instill a love for the game early on. For various reasons (Alfred leaving New Orleans being up there), I stopped playing in high school and only got back into the game in college. At this point, I fell back in love with the game and studied tirelessly. As a result of this, I improved my USCF rating from 1480 to 2000 in 6 months. I then decided I wanted to pursue chess full time and eventually became a National Master. I have since improved my USCF rating up to 2399 and my FIDE up to 2300. I have ambitions to become International Master and I believe I will be able to get there in just a couple of years time (tournament opportunities permitting).

I've won multiple tournaments in Louisiana, including the State Championship for blitz in 2019. However, my best tournament result was easily in the Chicago Open 2019 where I finished 7/7 and took clear 1st place in the U2300 division.

As I mentioned in my bio, I already have been teaching chess for over 10 years now despite being only 25 years old. I have taught students as young as 4 years old and others in their 60's. Some of my students started out without knowing how the pieces moved, others were experts trying to become master. I've had a wide range of experience as a teacher with all different types of students and I believe I'm equipped to meet your needs. In addition to my work as a private chess coach, I've also taught at Lusher Charter School as their head chess coach for 4 years now. We have a chess program with over 100 students and it's given me the opportunity to work with kids and their families of all backgrounds. Our school has been multiple time state champions and we've had some students place highly in Nationals (one student was top 5 in last year's Elementary Nationals).

I try to keep my lessons as active as possible for my students so that they are fully engaged in the learning process and can improve their skills the most. To do this, we often will spend time solving exercises that will have specific themes that I have picked out for the day that I feel my student needs more exposure to. I am most focused on improving the skill level and study habits of my students. To support this goal, I send my students homework exercises that we then will go over in the next lesson. I also try to recommend any books or videos I think my students may benefit from. I'm also happy to answer opening questions over email, too. Having said this, I also try to adapt to the goals and free time my students may have and I try to give everyone just enough work to reach their goals, but not too much to overwhelm them either. At the end of the day, chess should be enjoyable and fun!