Tamer Karatekin

Tamer Karatekin (born in 1981 in Yugoslavia) is a dual-career chess master, a renowned children's chess coach, and a prolific scholastic chess entrepreneur. He is a former Turkish Chess Champion in 2000 and a former first board player on MIT's chess team. He is most well known for his draws against world chess champions Kasparov and Karpov in simultaneous chess shows. He has coached numerous medalists in the World and European Youth and School chess championships. Tamer is also the designer of the ŞAHÎ chess set and chess icons and the curator of the SHATRANJ.ART exhibition on historic mind games and chess sets.

In addition to his chess-related endeavors, Tamer is a computer scientist, grant writer, project coordinator, technology product manager, and artificial intelligence educator. He leads the EU-funded SHATRANJ.AI project to build an artificial intelligence curriculum based on shatranj and other historic mind and board games. His company, Deep Sea Chess, maintains a free-access and culturally inclusive early childhood chess curriculum.

Biography
Tamer Karatekin was born in Yugoslavia in 1981 and grew up in Oldtown Fatih, Istanbul. He learned chess from his grandfather Mücahit Korça, who was the principal of the Tefeyyüz Elementary School in Skopje, Macedonia, a physics teacher and textbook writer, and the author of among the earliest Turkish-Yugoslavian and Turkish-Albanian dictionaries in the Balkans. Inspired by his grandfather and a regular visitor to the Istanbul Chess Association since his early years, Tamer Karatekin went on to become the chess champion of Türkiye in various categories many times.

Tamer Karatekin won the adult chess championship of Türkiye two points ahead of the competition in the year 2000 before the World Chess Olympiad was held in Istanbul in the same year. Previously, during the year 1997, he drew against the world chess champions Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov in simultaneous exhibitions in Istanbul.

Tamer Karatekin received the FM (FIDE Master) title and his first ELO rating at the age of 16 at the European Junior U20 Championship in Tallinn, Estonia. During his chess career, he won the Turkish Youth U20 Championships in 1998 and 1994, the Turkish Under-10 Championships in 1990 and 1991, the Turkish Under-14 Championship in 1994, and the Turkish Ministry of National Education Middle Schools Championship in 1998.

With the influence of his successes in the chess sport during his Turkish-German high school education (1992–2000) at Istanbul High School, Tamer Karatekin was accepted to Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate student in the year 2000. He studied at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science between 2000 and 2004. While playing as the first board of MIT's chess team and before, Tamer defeated the US Junior Champion Dean Ippolito  in 1998, Harvard Champion Marc Esserman  in 2002, and US High School Champion Patrick Hummel  in an MIT-Caltech college team match in 2003.

After his undergraduate education in the US, Tamer returned to Istanbul, where he enjoyed a career in management and entrepreneurship in various sectors, including software, tourism, food, and international trade. As a 2nd profession, he started to coach young chess players and train them for the World and European Youth Chess Championships. Among his pupils, there have been medalists in the World, Europe, World Schools, Europe Schools, Türkiye, and Istanbul championships. His most famous students are U8 World silver medalist CM Işık Can, with an international chess rating, ELO, above 2100 at age 9, and his sister U9 world school silver medalist CM Işıl Can. Tamer has also coached Elvin Büyük significantly, who shared 2nd place in the World School Girls U8 chess championship in 2016. Another of his students, Taha Özkan, went on to win the 2016 European School U9 Chess Championships in 2016. Işık Can won the U11 section of the European School Chess championship same year. Sample photos of Tamer's students can be found on his chess academy website. Based on the results of his students, Tamer was awarded the title of FIDE Trainer in 2015.

During the 2014–2015 school year, Tamer also taught around 300 first and second-grade students at Istanbul Technical University Development Foundation primary schools, one of the first schools in the world to have compulsory chess lessons in the curriculum. Having coached small children both one-on-one and in a group setting, Tamer noticed the need for better personalized chess learning tools for young learners. Following his classroom teaching experience, Tamer led the building of DEEP SEA CHESS, a culturally inclusive chess learning platform for compulsory chess lessons. DEEP SEA CHESS team participated in their school chess platform project and qualified as a semi-finalist (top 60) among 3000 participants at the Istanbul Technical University Seed Incubator program, ranked among the best in the EU and in the world. He continues to run this edtech company based in Istanbul, Türkiye, partnering with local and European NGOs, universities, and public school systems. He also regularly consults private school chains, ministries of education, and national chess federations about chess in schools.

In 2019, Tamer completed the graduate-level MITx Data, Economics, and Development Policy Micromasters program, led and taught by Nobel laureates in Economics, Prof. Duflo and Prof. Banerjee. The same year, he returned to MIT, taking courses across MIT's EECS and Economics departments and Sloan School of Management. During these studies, Tamer took a graduate-level course on "Artificial Intelligence in K12" from Prof. Abelson and Prof. Breazeal, advisors to the AI4K12.org initiative for artificial intelligence in elementary education in the United States. During the pandemic in 2021, Tamer earned MIT Sloan's Health graduate certificate while serving as co-president of the MIT's Entrepreneurs Club.

Afterward, Tamer Karatekin worked as a machine learning researcher on projects funded by the US National Institute of Health (NIH) and as a product manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. He currently continues his professional life in the United States.

As a graduate of MIT's both on-campus (EECS and Sloan Healthcare) and online programs (MITx DEDP), Tamer is an experienced entrepreneur, data scientist, and product manager with a strong background in the education and healthcare sectors. He has presented his research at leading conferences on machine learning in healthcare and artificial intelligence in education. He is the technical co-translator of the Amazon best-selling book "Machine Learning in 100 Pages."

As of 2024, Tamer Karatekin is the technical coordinator of the SHATRANJ.AI, an artificial intelligence curriculum based on historical mind games supported by the EU Erasmus+ Youth program. He is also the designer of the ŞAHÎ chess set and chess icons, supported by the Massachusetts Arts Council with a residency program in the Boston School System. The ŞAHÎ chess pieces and historical mind games exhibition, SHATRANJ.ART, was first displayed at the Hagia Sophia in January 2024.

Achievements

 * 2000 Turkish Chess Championship – Champion