Hello everyone!
My name is Simon Kubrynski and I’m the founder and main coach of Monki Moves.
I first learned chess from my father before I even entered kindergarten. He also taught my younger brother of two years the game and we turned into a VERY addicted chess playing family.
Growing up, our home didn’t have a ‘guest bedroom’ but rather a ‘chess arena’! Chess was our favorite hobby and we would play game after game for hours every day. We would even have our self proclaimed ‘Kubrynski Open’ family tournaments that we would hold with stringent rules enforced. Chess fever was very real!
This translated to both my brother and I dominating our school tournaments, taking 1st and 2nd every year respectively from our upperclassmen club members. We expanded to broader tournament play and continued to dominate at the state level, even going so far as to travel out of the country to play in large tournaments!
Ultimately, we found a new addiction in soccer and all of us put down the game for a whole decade!
Fast forward to the chess boom and chess was being popularized again with The Queen’s Gambit, Twitch sponsored chess tournaments, Covid-19, crazy cheating dramas and much more! I ended up falling back in love with the game, along with my family and friends.
I managed to climb from a starting chess.com rating of around 1200 to 2000 in my spare time in the past 2 years. My passion for the game is stronger than ever and I want to involve it in my life in any way that I can.
Going back in time to when I was in school, I completed a couple of years of college education towards a biomedical engineering degree and realized too late that I had no desire to do that for the rest of my life.
I didn’t complete my degree and instead elected to dive into the world and learn what it takes to manage a business, grow my skills in the marketplace, and take the path less traveled.
I’ve now been a trainer, manager and leader of several establishments including a high traffic flow dealership most recently.
Wanting to combine my skills and ability to teach/lead with my passion for chess, I came up with the idea to start up a chess school. I’m creating Monki Moves with the intention of creating an environment for frighteningly effective chess coaching. As a player who has gone down the self taught route, I understand which methods of training work and which fall flat.
I hope to be able to establish myself as the premium chess tutor of the lowcountry and super excited to get to meet the chess community that South Carolina has to offer!
- Simon Kubrynski