Sahan Karunaratne
Current CFC rating: 1495

Sahan has employed a vast number of strategies when teaching chess in the past as the president of his high school chess club. Some, such as exhaustively and exclusively reviewing an extremely complicated game, proved not to be beneficial or enjoyable. Others, such as starting off with the examination of simple positions and then turning to differing positions with the same underlying ideas but with increasing complexity have met with great success.

In particular, Sahan has discovered this use of puzzles to be an effective tool to train one of the skills most crucial to chess improvement: pattern recognition. In his lessons, he hopes to preserve the same joy that comes from playing chess, which, unfortunately, is often missing in chess instruction. Thus, he likes to place as much emphasis on solving puzzles as is reasonable, and he especially enjoys displaying beautiful games of chess.

Sahan would also like to add that he would not have been an active member of the Hart House Chess Club if it had not been for Panayioti Tsialas, who was an executive at the time. He constantly encouraged Sahan to take part in chess club events, participate in tournaments and spent a considerable amount of time when giving me thorough advice on how to improve his game. Sahan hopes to be able to replicate at least some of what Panayoti was able to do for his experience at the Hart House Chess Club in his capacity as a coach.

In addition to being a dedicated coach, Sahan has also been generously volunteering his time since the very start of the Covid lockdown to organize a wealth of online events including weekly blitz, bullet and rapid tournaments. Thanks to his tireless efforts, HHCC Online has been a tremendous success and club members have had the opportunity to gather and meet over the chessboard as often as before!

Chess Bio
– Events Coordinator at HHCC 2018-19
– 2nd year studying for an Applied Mathematics with Statistics Specialist
– Learnt chess at the age of 5
– Began playing rated tournaments after joining the Hart House Chess Club