We're Joining the World Champion's Team!

After fifteen years teaching chess to nearly 100,000 students, including students who have won 45+ state and national championships, this week marks a transition for Silver Knights: we are joining the Play Magnus Group!  For those of you who don’t know, Play Magnus is the company of none other than Magnus Carlsen, the highest-rated chess player of all time and the World Champion for the last 8 years (and counting)!

For two chess-loving brothers from New Mexico this is a dream come true.  We’re excited about the opportunities this will allow us to offer to our students in the future, including:

Live events with some of the best players in the world, including Magnus himself, Judit Polgar (the best female chess player ever), and many more.  Our live event with Judit last year was a magical experience for hundreds of students (not to mention our coaches!), and it’s simply amazing that our students will be able to participate in events like that with regularity in the future.

New technology from our new sister company Chessable, including the groundbreaking Chessable Classroom, which will allow us to teach better online lessons and give students fantastic ways to practice.  We participated in the beta, and it really did help students learn and participate in ways that would be impossible for either an in-person class or a class over Zoom.

The two of us, along with the rest of the Silver Knights team (including our amazing coaches) aren’t going anywhere.  We’ll still be here with Silver Knights every step of the way, as we resume in person activities and continue growing our online programs - but now, we’ll be doing it with the world champion on our team.

The last 15 years have been an incredible journey.  As we make this transition, we want to thank everyone who helped bring Silver Knights to this point:

Our students: thank you for being a part of this journey with us.  Thank you for bringing your enthusiasm, sense of humor, sportsmanship and respect, and showing us how much you can learn.  Thank you for making every day joyous and full of fun.

To the parents of our students: thank you for trusting us with your children.  Thank you for taking the leap to online chess instruction with us in the spring of 2020, when no one knew if it would even work!

To the many, many PTA and PTO volunteers we’ve worked with, along with the school administrators and hard-working staff from parks and rec departments: you do so much incredible work behind the scenes to make programs happen, and we appreciate it so much.

To our coaches and staff: thank you for the amazing work you’ve done, day in and day out, to make chess accessible, fun, and infinitely engaging to the next generation of players.  Thank you for being positive role models and showing children not just chess skills, but also the right way to play and how to show respect for themselves, each other, and the game.  Thank you for showing them how to win and lose gracefully as young children so that when they are adults, they will be more mature, even-keeled, and resilient to the successes and failures that life inevitably brings.

Here’s to the next 15 years!

Adam and Daniel