Coach's Corner: "Puzzle Pride" for My Student!

Hi ChessKid, my name is John Salisbury. I am a professional chess coach, founder of the Miami City Chess Club, manager of the United States Chess League Miami Sharks team, and I'm happy to be writing for "Coach's Corner" today!

One of my students is Nikhil Kumar. Nikhil is a 9 year old boy from Riviera Day School in Miami, Florida. He played his first chess tournament 9 months ago on 11/18/12. Since then he has done 12089 chess puzzles and in doing so, reached a max rating of 4033, making him the highest rated in chesskid.com history.

When I saw Nikhil reach his goal of mastering the Puzzles on ChessKid, I was so proud of my student. Nikhil’s record was set with hard work and determination! As his father, Alok Kumar reported, even on vacation in Europe, and even on days where he failed on more puzzles than he succeeded on, Nikhil never gave up! His pace, on average, was that of about 45 puzzles a day. The total time spent on puzzles was 76 hours, which comes out to 4,560 minutes. That means he averaged about 15 minutes a day working on his craft. Do you have 15 minutes a day to learn something new?

Dr Kumar and his family on vacation...

The great Vince Lombardi said, “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.” I have witnessed this first hand with Nikhil. He is always up for a challenge. It has been far from easy. In a short time he has lost many heartbreaking games. Nikhil is learning the important lessons for life from experience. Mainly, he's learned from this achievement that it matters not if you fall, but when you do, that you get back up. He is now rated over 1200 USCF, and climbing higher with every tournament

Greg Shahade wrote a great article recently stating, “If you want to get good at a random skill, just do it! It’s not that complicated.” Seems simple enough, but so many adults make it more difficult than it really is. They make excuses, have a fear of failure and do not prioritize their life. I have learned from my students. We have a lot to learn from our children. We have to learn from Nikhil.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story,

Nikhil's Coach,

John Salisbury.