About Us

In 2004, Adam Weissbarth was an enthusiastic chessplayer and a full-time graduate student in Statistics. A friend came across an ad from a local elementary school looking for a chess coach and passed it along. Adam responded to the ad and took the job. As soon as he started, he found that the best hour of his week was the time he spent teaching chess to the kids. After some thought and a lot of preparation, Adam decided to make a career change and teach chess to children full-time. He founded Silver Knights Chess in 2006, and in 2008, was joined by his brother Daniel, also a lifelong chessplayer -- and Adam's first student. You can see one of their first lessons below! Later that year, two of their students won national championships for the first (but not last) time.

For the last few years, we’ve been teaching chess to students in nearly 300 schools each week. We’ve also taught hundreds of summer camps, weekend chess tournaments, and more. We have a significant need-based scholarship program to allow hundreds of children each year from low-income families to participate in our programs free of charge.

In August of 2021, we joined the Play Magnus Group, the company of world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.  In March of 2022, we became Magnus Chess Academy, his official academy!

We also teach chess online. We offer games against other kids, tournaments, live lesson broadcasts/shows, small group lessons, and all sorts of other pre-recorded lessons, workouts, and exercises.