Bruce Pandolfini

Bruce Pandolfini (born September 17, 1947) is an American chess author, teacher, and coach. A USCF national master, he is generally considered to be America’s most experienced chess teacher. As a coach and trainer, Pandolfini has possibly conducted more chess sessions than anyone in the world. By the summer of 2015 he had given an estimated 25,000 private and group lessons.

In his books and columns he has explained his methodology for individual instruction, indicating that it consists of four basic parts.

The latter he achieves by relentlessly posing relevant questions, until the student absorbs the process of determining reasonable options and making logical choices.

Starting in the 1980s, Pandolfini identified and filled a role producing books especially for novices and intermediate players. His books have been influential and continue to be steady best sellers. While being one of the first chess writers in America to rely on algebraic chess notation, Pandolfini created and/or popularized a few other innovations in instructional chess writing. It had been common for chess authors to list several moves before showing a diagram. Pandolfini realized beginning players struggle with that format. Most of his books display larger diagrams, often with verbalized explanations (instead of a mere series of notated chess moves), so that beginning and casual players can examine chess games with greater ease and comprehension. Another aspect to Pandolfini’s teaching is his reliance on short, pithy, often counterintuitive statements to seize the student’s attention and stimulate imagination.

Pandolfini was born in Lakewood, New Jersey and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. His interest in chess was first realized when he was not quite fourteen. He was browsing in a public library, when he came upon the chess section. There were more than thirty books on the shelf, and they all seemed fascinating to him. The library permitted an individual to take out a certain number of books at a time. Pandolfini took out an initial batch of six books and then went back enough times that day to clear out the entire section. Then he skipped school for a month, instead immersing himself in the withdrawn books.

Although Pandolfini hadn’t played in many tournaments, he reached chess master strength by his late teens. His long and prolific chess-teaching career, however, didn’t begin until immediately after Bobby Fischer won the World Chess Championship in 1972 from Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, while Pandolfini was still working at the Strand Bookstore in Greenwich Village. During the match Pandolfini became an analyst for the PBS coverage. He served as an assistant to Shelby Lyman, the show’s insightful moderator, and at the time, America’s top chess teacher. It was Lyman who encouraged Pandolfini to pursue chess teaching as a career, and that’s what he soon did.

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