Latvia develops first chess-learning platform in the world

In Latvia, the world's first online chess training platform CoChess has been established in collaboration with the world chess champion, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, Latvian Television reported July 27.

CoChess allows you to learn and improve chess skills, supervised by professional coaches.

In order to create such a digital platform, two companies known in the chess sector joined forces some time ago, and decided to extend their activities not in their home countries, but by creating a branch directly in Latvia.

Andris Ozols, a former director of the Latvian Investment and Development Agency  (LIAA), visited the Chess24 office in Hamburg. They offered the company to make a branch in Riga. “They came to visit, liked Riga, and the rest is history,” said Laura Ereca, head of the CoChess platform.

After this meeting, everything happened very quickly – within six months, the online platform was ready.

“We have trainers from Romania, Lithuania, from Turkey, Ukraine. There are very different teachers. Depending on the languages they know, they can be allocated to very different students, from different zones of time,” Ereca said.

Programmer Maris Jirgens said that each coach works through a video camera. “You sit in Latvia somewhere deep in the fields, in your summer cottage, and learn to play chess with a man currently sitting in a coffee shop in New York. It's all in real time, you two get in touch, talk,” Jirgens explained.

Each coach has his own profile, rating and his or her own certain tuition fees. Students also have profiles and ratings. The CoChess leaders are convinced that in the future thousands of chess coaches from all over the world will be able to teach hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people.

Source: lsm.lv