IM Mark Quinn

Hi there, my name is Mark Quinn. I am an International Master of Chess, a seven-time Irish Chess Olympian and the founder of Chess Bud Ireland (www.chessbud.ie) I have almost three decades of coaching experience and am a full-time chess coach, writer and chess content creator. I hold a PhD in American Modern Literature from UCD, Dublin and am an official trainer to the Irish National Junior Chess Squad.

I teach individuals, private groups and school groups online and in-person. I also run a number of after-school chess programs in schools in Kilkenny City and County and give bespoke workshops to groups of players of all levels in schools, clubs and companies all-over Ireland.
See chessbud.ie/school-chess-workshops/

If you'd like to get a sense of my coaching style, I have two new Youtube channels with tutorials in English and Irish:

i) The Chess Bud Ireland' Channel.
See www.youtube.com/@ChessBudIreland

ii) The 'Imir Ficheall' Channel for anyone interested in learning chess through Irish.
See www.youtube.com/@ImirFicheall

Follow me on my Twitch.tv channel (see www.twitch.tv/chessbudireland) to receive notifications of when I am streaming and providing live commentary of Irish and International Tournaments or just playing blitz in English and Irish or a combination of the two! It's all a bit of fun and deadly serious...seriously!? :)

Individual Coaching:

I am always happy to take on new private students, as long as they have a true passion or curiosity for the game and can put up with my bad jokes. I have two training slots each morning from Monday to Friday which you can book directly through my website.
See chessbud.ie/individual-online-lessons-with-mark/

Monday to Friday:
Early Morning Class: 9:30-10:30am (60 minute class/ 60 Euro) or 9.30-11am (90 minute class/ 90 Euro)
Late Morning Class: 11:30-12:30pm (60 minute class) or 11:30-1pm (90 minute class/ 90 Euro)

Alternatively, if these morning times don't suit, just drop me an email (mark@chessbud.ie) and we will find an afternoon, evening or weekend time that suits.

Online Group Classes:

I hold online group classes throughout the year from September to June for both kids and adults.

There is continuous enrolment - so if there are places left in a class - you can join midway through a course and you only pay for the classes you attend.

All the details for my Sep 2025 - April 2026 Courses can be found on www.chessbud.ie or by clicking on the following links

After-School Clubs for Primary and Secondary School Students - 5-6.15pm Irish Time/ 10 Euros per Student per class:
Monday: After-School Advanced Club: chessbud.ie/monday-after-school-kids-club-advanced/
Tuesday: After-School Experienced Beginners Club: See chessbud.ie/tuesday-after-school-kids-club-experienced-beginners/
Wednesday: Club Fichille Dé Céadaoin do Tosaitheorí le Taithí: Féach ar chessbud.ie/club-fichille-ar-line-do-phaisti-scoile/
Thursday: After-School Intermediate Club: chessbud.ie/thursday-afternoons-attack-like-a-master-defend-like-a-lion/

Adult Courses:
Tuesday Evening Club for Adults (16+); 7-8.30pm/ 12 Euros per Student per class:
See chessbud.ie/tuesday-night-advanced-club-middlegame-plan-formation-calculating-better-and-deeper/

JUNIOR INTERNATIONAL:

I made my debut for Ireland at the World Under 14 chess championships in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1990. The remarkable and awe-inspiring Judit Polgar won my section! That summer, I went on to represent Ireland in my first team event - the under-19 Glorney Cup in Arnhem, Holland. Over the next years, I represented Ireland in many World and European Junior Championships and Glorney Cups. During those years, I was schooled in Gonzaga College in Dublin which had a strong chess tradition which continues to this day. I won numerous Leinster and All-Ireland titles with the Gonzaga team. The highpoint of my school chess career was leading Gonzaga to victory in the UK Schools Chess Championships in Marlwood in 1993, scoring 7/7 on Board 1 and attaining the Tournament’s Best Performance Prize. This was the first time an Irish team had ever won the event.

OLYMPIADS, CLUB COMPETITIONS & IM TITLE:

After scoring my first IM norm at the last Lloyd's Bank Masters in the summer of 1994, I made my Senior debut for Ireland at the Moscow Chess Olympiad that December with a memorable hard-fought first-round draw with black against GM Zigurds Lanka (Latvia). Over the next decade or so, I attended university gaining a BA, MA and finally PhD in Contemporary American Literature. I also worked as a National Tourguide bringing American and Italian tourists around Ireland, which helped finance various stints on the European Chess Circuit, as well as my studies. I played many tournaments in Italy and Spain for several successive summers during my twenties using Padua as a base. I had studied in Padua for a year as part of the Erasmus Exchange Program during my undergraduate degree. I was amazed to discover a thriving chess tradition fostered by a gregarious and generous local antiques dealer Alessandro Bordin. This is where I met my good friends IMs Carlo Rossi and Federico Manca with whom I analysed and trained and with whom I played many open tournaments and team events in Italy and further afield . I also began my chess coaching career in this period offering private lessons to Irish juniors many of whom went on to represent Ireland at junior and senior level. Owing to work and study commitments, I was never in a position to become a full-time professional player. I played when I could and while still a full-time student or working in tourism, I represented Ireland at six further chess Olympiads: Yerevan (1996), Istanbul (2000), Bled (2002), Calvia (2004), Turin (2006) and Dresden (2008). I also played board 1 for Ireland at the European Team Chess Championships in Leon, Spain in 2001 and competed in the super-strong Escaldes Zonal Tournament in Andorra in 1998.

CLUB EVENTS:

The FIDE-rated Armstrong Cup is the oldest continuous chess league in the world and I have played in it since I was a teenager, first winning the Armstrong Cup with Rathmines in 1993 and then with Kilkenny in 2011. I also played regularly for Richmond Chess Club in the English 4NCL before the club disbanded and for Bindlach in the German Bundesliga for a number of years. My Italian club cup appearances include competing in the finals of the Italian Team Championship for Marostica (2015) and Arzignano del Grifone (2021-2022).

I was awarded the title of International Master of Chess at the FIDE Congress during the Istanbul Olympiad in 2000. If memory serves me well, I had about 5 or 6 IM norms by the time I touched the magic 2400 barrier. I was ranked number 1 in Ireland for a time at the age of 17 and am currently the Number 5 ranked active Irish player on the FIDE rating list with 2366 Elo. My highest FIDE rating back in 2002 was 2429 Elo.

My coaching journey began in primary and secondary schools in Dublin while I was undertaking my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. I coached a number of private students throughout these years who went on to play for Ireland at junior and senior level and also 'seconded' individual students at international norm events in Ireland and abroad, as well as being the coach for the Irish Glorney Cup team at Glasgow in 2009.

In 2019, I founded Chess Bud Ireland and began designing and writing my own chess curriculum based on two decades of experience coaching and mentoring students. This is when I made the shift to online coaching, while still offering in-person individual and group lessons in the form of Workshops and Seminars. I gained the title of FIDE Trainer in April 2020 after completing a course led by former world-number 3 GM Artur Yusupov and the highly creative German GM Thomas Luther.

Throughout the pandemic I offered online group classes to students of all ages and levels of experience. In these years, I coached hundreds of adults who were new to the game or who were returning after a long break.

These online classes made me particularly conscious of certain specific difficulties that adult students face coming to the game later in life - the greatest challenge being how to remember variations and lines.

In the last five years, I have developed my own unique approach to tackling the memory issue and I have set myself the challenge of helping each individual student to tap into their own unique creativity and to have fun while they set about making the most of their chess talent and achieving whatever chess goals they may have. Playing chess has to be fun. It's got to be a creative journey. It can't just be a memory test. So I try to design programs and workbooks that cater to each student's specific needs and playing style. Then it is up to you, to see how far you want to go on the chess journey.

A big part of my role as chess coach is to manage the expectations of players of all ages and levels of experience as they pursue their passion for chess and set-out to achieve their personal chess goals.

To my mind, chess is one of the most beautiful and inspiring forms of creativity and self-expression that any person can avail of during their life's journey. It is much more than a sport or science. At its essence, chess is both a martial discipline and dynamic art form. This artistic side of the game has always been the most personally rewarding aspect of the game for me. The more engaged I am with ideas and positions that fascinate and intrigue me, the better my enjoyment of the game and also usually my results. Working on chess in a structured disciplined way has also brought great rewards, not to mention transferable skills which I have been able to utilise in other walks of life.

My role as a chess coach is to help each student to develop both the martial and artistic aspects of their game, so as he or she can harness and focus their individual creativity in a disciplined way.

My mission to help each student become the best chess martial artist that they can be.

That's enough about you, now what about me :) Well, I was six years old when I discovered some old chess pieces stuffed in a drawer in the family home in Dublin. I found no chess board. No visible sign of the battleground that these fantastical figures moved through and fought in. My mother, Rosemary, told me the mysterious figures belonged to an ancient game played by Kings and Queens. I wondered how these warriors had arrived in our home. My mother told me the story of a little girl, who had heard about an ancient game and asked her parents for a board and chess men for Christmas. The protagonists and their battle-field duly materialised, but no one in the little girl's family knew how to play. As there was no chess club in her city, the pieces were left to languish in their box. As the decades passed, little by little, gradually , most of the warriors found their freedom. By the time the little girl grew up, got married and had her own family, a few solitary warriors remained in a box, stuffed in a drawer, the rest scattered like Japanese Ronin to the seven winds. Luckily for this little boy, a few had been kept as keep-sakes. It was these last samurai that a bored six-year old discovered rooting around in an old desk one rainy day. His life would never be the same again.

Over the next months, I pestered my parents to get a new set and teach me the game. My dad, Tom, eventually arrived home with a nice wooden board with magnetic pieces and picked up a beginner's chess book from the local library. Dad never learnt the game, but patiently followed the lessons in the book until I was a sufficient level to go to a local junior club which met in a nearby parish hall once a week. I played for fun all through junior school using my beginner's mind, learning through play and practical experience. I only started studying the game seriously after my mother bumped into an expert player (2000 Elo+) and coach who had seen me play, who told her I was 'far too immature to every become a good player'. Being written off as a chess player at the grand-old age of eleven must have injured my pride as I went straight down the local library when school broke for holidays that summer and set about studying the game seriously. Screenwriters call this pivotal moment, 'The Call to Adventure'. Without realising it, I was already on a quest. That summer I put some manners on my attacking play and also learned the importance of defence. I had no-one to play at home that summer, so I had to play myself and then analyse and play out my favourite lines for both sides. The following September I played my first over-the-board rated tournament scoring 0/6. I then managed 1.5/6 in my next tournament including a full-point bye. No great shakes indeed! It is fair to say that my first steps into the world of chess tournaments were inauspicious and far from exceptional. I would come to learn that every chess expert's journey - with the possible exception of chess prodigies such as Capablanca and Reshevsky - begins in this way. A chess player's passion, fascination and love of the game has to be able to overcome the inevitable string of losses one experiences at the beginning of one's career. This is why managing the expectations of students new to the game is one of the most important tasks for any chess coach. In my third, fourth and successive tournaments, I gained a few more draws and the occasional win and slowly but surely began to find my own rhythm. There were no chess coaches in Ireland at the time, but over the next two years, I was fortunate in that I was able to test my chess skills regularly against a large group of strong chess players in the class ahead in school. My initial Irish rating was 738 Elo, my next rating came in at 1047 Elo. By the following summer I jumped up to 1428 Elo and gained another three hundred points to 1756 Elo by the Christmas of 1989. The following April, I won my first Irish Title, becoming Irish Under-14 champion and was selected to represent Ireland that year in the World Under-14 Boys Championships in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, U.S.A. My Irish Rating as I set off that July was 2035 Elo. To this day, I feel exceptionally grateful to the chess expert who wrote me off. We all need a little push every now and again, to make us aware of what's actually important to us.

That is how I came to begin my chess adventure, an adventure which continues to this day. Not just as a player but now also as a coach, whose mission is to help students plot their own individual chess journeys by sharing what I have learned on the road to chess mastery.

When I am not playing, studying or coaching chess, I am happiest hanging out with my daughter Fleur, my son Nathaniel and my best friend and better-half Donna. You will also find me inventing stories for TV and Film and writing screenplays.

Rather than approaching chess coaching in a purely analytic fashion, I have developed my own inter-disciplinary approach when coaching, that seeks not just to inspire students, but also to help them to bring their own life experiences and interests to bear on their game. In my classes with individuals and groups, I draw down not just on my extensive chess and coaching career but also on my various life experiences encompassing screenwriting, film reviewing, literary criticism, tutoring and lecturing at third level, not to mention two decades working in Tourism as a National Tour Guide in Ireland and Group Leader Abroad.

My teaching approach for individual students involves providing bespoke content - in the form of specially selected annotated games - and training sessions, where students play and learn and receive immediate feedback, so as to progress their knowledge and build organically on their natural talent. Anders Eriksson's theory of 'Deliberate Practice' has been central to this training method.

When I founded Chess Bud Ireland in 2019, I set about developing my own chess curriculum. My goal is to give every player who trains with me the grounding and skills they will need to break through and move beyond the magical 2000 Elo barrier. Some of my students are complete beginners, others are expert club players. Some are tilting for national titles and pursuing IM norms.

I also often 'second' students competing for Irish National Titles or when they are competing abroad. As a second, I help to map out a program of study, weeks and sometimes months in advance of a big tournament. During the event, I play the role of an invisible wingman helping to prepare students for key encounters.