From Player to Coach

Tigran Gyozalyan first touched a chess piece at three years old, watching his father play with friends in their home in Vanadzor, Armenia. His father was a chemist, one who had contributed to melamine compounds for spacecraft. His mother was also a chemist, working in a glue factory where she pioneered ways to repurpose waste materials into new products. Both were scientists and understood the value of thinking deeply.

When his father thought Tigran was old enough to learn, he discovered something: the boy already knew how the pieces moved. He had been watching, absorbing, learning without being taught.

Chess consumed his childhood. He missed school for tournaments traveling across Armenia and beyond to compete. He was talented. He was hungry. But at some point, he had to choose: football or chess. He chose chess, not because it was the obvious path, but because he loved it more.

As a competitive player, Tigran was strong. He competed against Grandmasters, won championships, represented Armenia at the highest levels. But strength as a player and success as a player are not the same thing. He reached a ceiling – the kind every dedicated player hits eventually. And when he did, he realized something that would change his life:

He didn’t have the right coach.

“If I had been coached properly,” he said later, “I would have been a better player by this age.”

He couldn’t go back and change his own path. But he could change the path for others.

He decided to study coaching formally. He earned his degree in chess coaching and pedagogy from the Russian State University of Physical Education, Sport, Youth and Tourism in Moscow. Then his master’s degree in coaching at the same institution. He wasn’t just another strong player teaching on the side. He was studying the science of how children learn, how thinking develops, how a foundation is built.

When he returned to Vanadzor, he started coaching. One of his early students was Samvel Ter-Sahakyan, a five-year-old with potential. Tigran took him through the system he had studied. Eight years later, Samvel earned the Grandmaster title one day before his 15th birthday.

His theory was right. The right coach at the right time fast-tracks everything.

Over the decades that followed, he coached Narine Gasparyan and Liana Aghbekyan in Armenia. Both became titled players, both competed at the European level. The pattern held.

In 2005, he moved to Singapore. He arrived with a method, a belief, and no reputation. He started coaching students quietly, one by one. Then came Derek Lim, who at age six became Singapore’s youngest world chess champion.

Then came Ashwath Kaushik, who at eight years old became the youngest player ever to defeat a Grandmaster in classical chess. This was a world record that made headlines on BBC, CNN, and The Guardian.

Over nearly two decades in Singapore, he has coached national champions, ASEAN champions, titled players, and countless children whose names will never appear in a tournament record but who learned something deeper: how to think strategically, how to approach problems with clarity, how to make decisions independently.

What strikes parents most isn’t the titles, though. It’s what happens after.

Many of his students go on to do things unrelated to chess entirely. They become doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics. And when they reflect on why they succeeded, they often point back to chess; not the game itself, but what they learned in the lessons. How to think. How to see the board clearly. How to build something strong from the ground up.

“I don’t teach kids how to play chess,” Tigran says. “I teach them how to think strategically and creatively through chess so they can think independently and make effective decisions, whether it’s in their game of chess, or in life.”

This is why he coaches. Not to produce champions, though champions do come. But to build thinkers. To give children the foundation he wishes he had. To prove, over and over again, that the right coach, at the right time, can change the trajectory of a child’s life.