NM Jordan Groff

I am a National Master living in Hamden, Connecticut. I teach chess with Play More Chess Academy (playmorechess.com) in Hamden. I love everything about chess and hope to inspire you on your journey toward chess improvement!

I play as many tournaments as I can, from weekend quads to big tournaments like the Foxwoods Open or World Open. Most notably, I won the 2023 New Britain Chess Club Championship, a 7 round classical tournament played over the course of 7 weeks. I take pride in my rapid improvement, having gained around 100-200 USCF rating points every year since 2018, when I first started taking chess seriously.

I've taught chess for 4 years to both adults and kids, ranging from total beginners to around 2000 lichess. I always encourage students to play over the board tournaments, and the ones who play regularly tend to see consistent growth. I had one student who increased his online rating by over 100 points just a week after our first lesson!

The most important part of my lessons is analyzing games played by the student, preferably tournament games, but rapid/classical games played online are also fine. We generally analyze without the engine, although we might 'ask it a question' once in awhile: the engine is a valuable tool if you use it properly, but it's easy to misinterpret it! While analyzing the games, we look for patterns of mistakes, either due to the type of position or to the student's thought process. I usually teach lessons in sets of 4 so that we have the chance to do some lessons targeted towards a specific area, although I can be flexible with this. For example, if I see that a student is making many mistakes in the endgame, I would dedicate 1 or 2 lessons to the endgame. I would pick out a few instructive games for us to go over together
, either from famous classic games, games played in recent elite tournaments, or sometimes my own games.