The Chess Effect

Welcome to The Chess Effect, where we believe in the power of chess to transform lives and communities. We were founded in 2020 by International Master Sandeep Sethuraman with the mission of making the game of chess accessible to all, and we try to accomplish this by holding fundraiser tournaments and offering free lessons.

We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit: That’s right! All of the profits from our fundraisers will be donated to Arizona Helping Hands (https://azhelpinghands.org/give/). We would also like to thank our generous sponsors, LIL Venture Fund, the only Venture Fund dedicated to funding High School Ventures. Please learn more about LIL at https://www.scholarlaunch.org/leadership-innovation-lab.

Join Our Free Lessons

We offer free lessons! That’s right, we believe all players should have access to chess coaching regardless of their socioeconomic status. All of our coaches are volunteers and share a passion for both chess and serving their community.

Join a Fundraiser Tournament

Since all of our lessons are completely free, our way of fundraising is by holding tournaments, both online and over-the-board. To date we have held 3 fundraiser tournaments with over 150 participants from complete beginners to masters. You can check these out under our tournaments menu. Our next tournament will be the July Chess Effect Fundraiser on Saturday, July 15th, and we would love it if you could join us!

Join The Chess Effect Family

We are currently accepting applications to become a Chess Effect Coach. This is restricted to advanced players of high-school age or older, but we appreciate everyone’s interest in our organization. We also welcome donations that are used to fund the creation of more tournaments and lessons. All support helps us achieve our goal of giving everyone an opportunity to discover the beauty of playing chess.