Silver Knights Visits the Perpetual Chess Podcast

If you’ve ever listened to a chess podcast, there’s a good chance it was Perpetual Chess, the longest-running chess podcast, which has accrued upwards of six million downloads and is listened to in more than 100 countries. Some of the biggest names in chess have stopped by to talk about the game, including IM Levy Rozman (known as GothamChess on YouTube), Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest, GMs Judit Polgar and Hikaru Nakamura, and former World Champion and GM Vishy Anand.

Our founder and CEO Adam Weissbarth first appeared on the show in 2018 and returned for a recent episode, where he shared his insights on running a successful chess business, told the chaotic tale of how Silver Knights survived the pandemic, and talked about the company’s recent successes, including the addition of a third grandmaster to our team of Elite Academy instructors. 

Watch the episode below (Adam’s portion begins around the 43:12 mark), or read on for a recap of his conversation with host Ben Johnson.

Getting Through the Pandemic

In the years since Adam’s first guest spot, Silver Knights has undergone a number of changes. Prior to the pandemic, we taught exclusively in-person at 300 sites across the Baltimore-Washington metro area. So when schools, rec centers, and other facilities–all the venues that hosted our clubs and camps–closed their doors in March of 2020, the company faced a big dilemma: how do you keep a chess teaching business alive when kids can’t attend classes?

The day after they received word that schools were shuttering, Adam and his brother Daniel, our co-founder and COO, went on a five hour walk to figure out how to save Silver Knights. Ultimately, they decided to take a chance on a novel concept that seemed like a wild idea at the time: teaching chess online. 

At that point, virtual chess classes–particularly for scholastic chess–were basically unheard of. If you’d asked us in February, we’d have told you that online classes wouldn’t have worked, and had a whole list of smart reasons why not… but by March, we were in a corner and had to try. Over the course of a few months, we learned and iterated, and by the time we got to July we weren’t just running online classes, we were running excellent ones. Here's a clip from one of these early sessions:

Since then, our online classes have morphed into the Academy program, which has grown to teach students of every skill level and turned Silver Knights into a global enterprise. We’ve helped students from all 50 states and dozens of countries experience the joy of chess and improve their play. This year, 11 of our Academy students became state scholastic champions, and two others earned National Master titles. 

Restructuring and Recovering

Unfortunately, losing access to in-person coaching sites carried a huge cost: the 250-person staff that ran our programs had nowhere to teach, and without clubs and camps to send them to, Silver Knights had no work to offer them. In one of the most difficult experiences of their careers, Adam and Daniel had to cut the staff down to just three people. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to say to anyone,” said Adam of having to announce the layoffs. “I’m not too ashamed to say that was probably the most I’ve ever cried in a day as an adult because it was just so painful.”

The following months were spent moving out of the company’s sprawling Northern Virginia office, selling off furniture and equipment to try and preserve some cash in the bank, and designing the blueprint for the virtual classes that would go on to become our online Academy. Daniel’s 2021 blog post about Silver Knights’ state of affairs gives contemporaneous insight into how uncertain the future still looked at that stage, as well as the early successes of the Academy program, which was beginning to get off the ground and see a steady increase in membership. 

By the summer of 2021, the first opportunities for a return to in-person chess began to arise, but the company once again faced a staffing problem. “It was challenging to get coaches to come back. A lot of them had moved on,” said Adam. “And understandably so, people would say one week, ‘OK, I’m gonna go coach,’ and then the next week, they [were] like, ‘I don’t want to coach. I don’t want to get sick.’ So managing that was very messy, but over the next few years, everything normalized, and at this point our programs have more than recovered. We’re in more schools than we were before and have higher enrollment than we ever did before.”

Thriving Through Online Chess Classes

As students continued to take online Academy classes, their ratings began to climb. “A lot of those kids started getting really good,” said Adam. “We started getting more and more kids who were above 1400 that had started from nothing, and at that point, we didn’t have a lot of people who could teach them.” 

To ensure these students could continue to develop as players, Silver Knights created the Elite Academy program, designed for students with over-the-board ratings of 1400 and above. “The commitment we made to the families was that those [coaches] were gonna be grandmaster coaches only. We have FMs and IMs who teach some of the other more advanced kids, but once you’re at 1400, your coach is a GM.”

Growing the Academy

The first to join the program was GM Johan Hellsten, a renowned author and devoted coach who has also appeared on the podcast. “A lot of grandmasters look at coaching as this grubby thing you do when you’re a sell-out and don’t want to compete anymore or something, and I don’t think that’s true of him,” said Adam. “I think he really takes coaching seriously, and you want someone like that. He’s got a class of kids who are all 2100-2200 players. That’s a special group. You want someone teaching [them] who really takes seriously the responsibility to give that group the best coaching they can get.” Since then, two more grandmasters have joined the coaching team.

What began as a temporary means of survival in tough times has ultimately expanded the company’s mission and allowed Silver Knights to solidify itself as a place for all kids–whether they’re brand new players or experienced competitors–to explore, learn, and grow with the game.

“Before we started teaching online, we didn’t really have anything amazing to offer kids who got to the non-beginner level. We tried, but it was too hard to gather them in one place. For most people at the company, the main mission is getting as many kids as possible excited about chess, learning the basics, having fun, experiencing winning and losing, and growing through joining chess clubs. But I think we now also have a focus through this Academy program, for kids who are really into chess and love the game and want to compete hard at it, to help [those kids] be successful.”

Going to the Supernationals Chess Tournament

This year, we had nearly 80 students compete at the Supernationals chess tournament, which turned into a weekend of competition, community, and camaraderie. “We got a team room and had three coaches there,” said Adam. (Correction: we had four coaches there!) The best part? Watching longtime virtual classmates finally meet face-to-face after years of taking classes together. 

“They know each other’s favorite openings and have played before but never met, so it was really fun to see them meet and their parents get to meet. The kids spent the weekend hanging out and it was kind of this magical experience.”

We’re already looking forward to heading back next year! 

Commercial Success in Scholastic Chess

For those looking to start a chess coaching business of their own, there are a few key elements to consider. Choosing the right staff and developing a solid approach to instruction are among the most critical. Here are Adam’s tips for getting a chess company off the ground.

Creating a Chess Curriculum

An array of online resources are available for educators or other adults interested in teaching students the basics of chess, but what’s the best way to introduce the game to new players? According to Adam, the right curriculum isn’t defined by any particular set of concepts–it’s simply one that keeps things interesting and makes students excited to engage with the material.

“There’s no pre-determined list of things the kids have to learn to pass a test or something,” says Adam of Silver Knights’ approach to teaching beginners. “They’ve gotta learn how to play the game and learn some basic strategy so they can start getting checkmates and winning, and that’s really it. Whatever they can learn that they think is cool and inspires them to wanna play more is the goal.”

Helping Your Employees Help You--and Your Students

If you want your chess business to see sustainable growth, it’s crucial to support your staff. There’s more to being a good chess coach than simply playing well–as Adam puts it, it’s generally more important for a coach to be a good teacher than it is for them to be excellent at the game, particularly when it comes to coaching beginner and intermediate students. (Read more about the qualities of a good instructor for every skill level in our guide to finding a chess coach.) By providing plenty of resources and education for each employee, you can improve the quality of their work and keep students coming back.

“Where I’ve seen some people struggle is when they hire someone to do some teaching but don’t think to themselves, ‘OK, I’ve gotta give this person a lot of training and support, and that might even mean changing what I’m doing.’ If you want to build an organization, you have to get as excited about supporting and training the people you hire as you initially were about coaching yourself.”

Final Thoughts

Still curious to learn more about the chess world? Whatever topic interests you, there’s probably an episode of Perpetual Chess about it. From the psychology of the game to advice from grandmasters and beyond, Perpetual Chess offers thoughtful conversation and analysis from experts of all kinds. Episodes are available on all major podcast platforms and on YouTube.

For more updates on all things Silver Knights, keep an eye on our blog–we’ve got lots of exciting news coming soon!