IMMaximiliano Pérez

I am Maximiliano Pérez, an International Master from Argentina, professional player, and coach with over 15 years of teaching experience. I started giving private chess lessons in 2008, and teaching has since become a core part of my career. I have worked as a coach in various educational institutions in Argentina, including Colegio Manuel Estrada, Instituto General Pacheco, Colegio Antonio Berni, Aberdare College, Colegio Babar, and Northlands. I have also taught group classes, seminars, and training sessions in chess clubs. Since 2017, I have participated in high-performance training programs for Argentine youth champions under the National Secretariat of Sports. In 2019, I was the delegation head and coach for the Argentine National Team at the Pan American Youth Championship held in Guayaquil, Ecuador. All this experience, from school teaching to training high-level competitive players, has allowed me to develop a flexible methodology and understand that different players may need completely different paths to improve. Throughout my career, I have worked with players of different ages and levels, although my work is currently especially aimed at ambitious players looking to progress roughly from 1800 to 2350 Elo, helping them develop a deeper understanding of the game and build a thought process they can apply independently during their games. My coaching philosophy starts from a simple idea: improving at chess is not just about accumulating knowledge, but about learning to think better. That is why one of the questions I use most often during my classes is: “How did you reach that conclusion?” Often a player's problem is not a lack of knowledge about a concept, but the process they used to evaluate a position, select candidate moves, calculate a variation, or make a decision. My goal is to understand that process, detect error patterns, and work on them. My ultimate goal as a coach is for each player to develop tools that progressively allow them to depend less on the teacher and more on their own understanding. Because, ultimately, the goal is not just to teach the student what to think in a given position, but to teach them how to think when a position arises that they have never seen before.