Just as our facility allows for almost every type of chess experience, my experience is varied:

As a chess player, I have tied for first in the Reserve Section of the Pennsylvania State Championship (1995), played in 4 Pan-American Collegiate Chess Championships, finishing on teams that regularly came in around the top 5, including a 3rd place finish in 1993. I am currently in the top 10% of all players in US Chess.

As a teacher, I have taught classes and camps for over a decade including the 2014 Pennsylvania Elementary School Champions – Skyview Elementary. I have also had schools adjust their schedule so that I could teach at their school. I have taught over 100 private students in the last decade. Several have been state champions, such as Shawn Wang and Aneesh Raparla. I currently have numerous former students on the Top 100 lists including Shawn Wang and Jack Lieberman. Their experiences with me not only taught them a great deal but provided them with the foundation they needed to continue working on improving long after they stopped working directly with me.

As a tournament director and organizer, I am one of just a handful of Senior level tournament directors in the state of Pennsylvania. I have directed over 200 hundred tournaments and well over 550 sections. Since 2009, I have directed (and organized over the last few years) the Holly Heisman Memorial, one of the largest yearly charity events in the country.

As a chess journalist and scholar, I have been President of the Chess Journalists of America for the past five years and Chief Coordinating Judge of the Chess Journalists of America Awards for seven of the past eight years. I have won national awards for Best Feature Article – 2018 and Best Historic Article – 2019. Currently I am under contract with McFarland Publishing for a book about the Byrne brothers, contemporaries of Bobby Fischer. I occasionally help US Chess with special projects of a historical nature (such as digitizing their 80-year run of Chess Life.) I am also leading a joint Chess Journalists of America/ U.S. Chess Trust/World Chess Hall of Fame project to collect oral histories of older U.S. Chess players.

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