06/05/2026
An American media outlet recently published an article about our tournament at the Chicago Chess Center:
https://thecomeback.com/.../what-does-it-take-to-referee...
What Does It Take to Referee Grandmasters and Coach Second-Graders in the Same Week? Certified chess arbiter Oleksandr Shymanskyi Knows
When IM Schmakel took first, and GM Gurevich finished second at the Chicago Chess Center in May, the arbiter behind the table turned out to be a FIDE Master who runs a 400-student children's chess club across four Chicago suburbs
The Chicago Chess Center, the city's main rated-tournament venue, ran an open tournament across two playing rooms in its Lincoln Square space in early May. The field carried titled and rated talent down to the under-1000 level. International Master Sam Schmakel took first place and the $300 prize. Grandmaster Dmitry Gurevich — four-time US. Open champion, GM since 1983 — finished second. Schmakel had entered the event as one of Illinois' strongest active masters; Gurevich is among the most decorated U.S.-based grandmasters of his generation. Together, their presence pulled the event well past the routine weekend Swiss bracket and into the category that draws spectators and serious club players from across the suburbs.
But some keep viewers noticed another chair that was important, though, it was not at any of the boards for some reason. It was at the arbiter's table. Oleksandr Shymanskyi, who arbitrated the entire tournament, is not a former club player filling a volunteer role. He is ranked in the top one percent nationally, holds both the FIDE Master and U.S. National Master titles, and sits among the top twenty active players in Illinois. He still competes in tournaments regularly — meaning that on a different Saturday, in a different chair, he would have been one of the players Schmakel and Gurevich were trying to beat.
The rest of his week looks nothing like the Chicago Chess Center. On weekdays, Shymanskyi runs Chess Club "Lion," a four-branch youth program across the Chicago suburbs, where roughly 400 students — many of them absolute beginners when they walked in — train under his coaching. Handling a FIDE time-trouble protest for a titled professional on Saturday, then explaining to a second-grader on Monday why touching a piece means moving it: that range is unusual enough in American chess that it is the reason this profile exists.
How an arbiter ends up refereeing grandmasters
A certified First Category Chess Judge credential, issued by the Ukrainian Committee on Physical Culture and Sports in 2002, gives Shymanskyi the formal authority to officiate regional and national-level competitions. Over two decades, he has judged more than a hundred tournaments across Ukraine and the United States, from scholastic events with several thousand children to open tournaments featuring FIDE-titled competitors. When the Chicago Chess Center needed an arbiter for an event strong enough to arbitrate chess games played by a grandmaster and multiple masters, Shymanskyi was the call. Gurevich, who finished second at that same May tournament, already knew Shymanskyi's work well.
"Gurevich wrote me a formal assessment back in November," Shymanskyi says. "A four-time U.S. Open champion, whose students include Awonder Liang and Alice Lee, took the time to put on paper that my competitive record, coaching credentials, and organizational work form something rare in this profession. He said the prizes my students keep bringing home from Chicago Chess Foundation and Continental Chess Association events are not luck – they point to a deliberate system. That letter means more to me than most of my own tournament results."
The Continental Chess Association hosts several tournaments in Illinois each year, featuring prize funds of $20,000 in July, $30,000 in October, and up to $100,000 in May. These events greatly contribute to the development of chess throughout the region and create strong demand for chess arbiters and coaches.
For Oleksandr Shymanskyi, however, officiating tournaments featuring grandmasters is only one side of his professional life, while the other is to work with young children who haven’t learnt to read chess notation yet. Specifically, the journey from the September intake of students to the March awards defines the value of his work.
Chess Club “Lion” operates out of four locations in the greater Chicago area, with partnerships at Plato Academy, Science Academy of Chicago, and Alpha & Omega Church in Roselle, where the club runs its own internal tournament series on FIDE protocols — every game registered with chess-results.com, so that an eight-year-old's first rated win enters an international database alongside a grandmaster's. That pipeline shows up at outside events.
Between 2022 and 2025, club students entered twelve Chicago Chess Foundation scholastic tournaments — events that regularly draw 200 to 336 competitors. At the Mt. Carmel High School tournament in February 2024, Bohdan Semkiv — one of a recognizable cohort of Ukrainian-American children Shymanskyi has trained since the 2022 migration wave reached Chicago — won the Advanced Individual category. Within this competition, Illia Shutkov took first in the secondary school age group (grades 6–8). Two students from the same club, won their respective categories on the same day.
The pattern travels: at the Midwest Class 2023, a national-level tournament run by the Continental Chess Association with a $20,000 prize fund, George Koval finished first among 46 players in the under-1100 category and collected a $500 check — a result that signals a coaching pipeline rather than a single lucky run. Matthew Kearney, head of the Chicago Chess Foundation, has described the Chess Club “Lion” as one of the most active youth chess programs in the state. However, Shymanskyi measures the same outcomes differently.
“A child who has never seen a chess clock in September and wins a prize at a 300-player tournament in March, that is the result I care about,” Shymanskyi says. “Rating points follow. Confidence comes first.”
Where titles come from, and why they matter at the coaching level
Shymanskyi did not start as a coach. Competition came first, and the titles accumulated over two decades of tournament play. At the age of fifteen, he won the Kyiv Regional Youth Championship. A bronze medal came at the Ukrainian School Team Chess Championship, where he played first board. FIDE awarded him the FM title in 2017 which he immediately confirmed at the XXVII Open Playas de Cartaya in Spain, winning the first place among 93 players from several countries. In 2024, he earned the U.S. National Master designation.
Why does any of that matter for coaching children? Because competitive credentials translate directly into the ability to prepare students for pressure, to recognize patterns in their games before they do, and to attract the kind of professional recognition that opens doors. Shymanskyi holds honorary membership in both the Bila Tserkva Chess Federation and the Ukrainian Chess Federation, the latter of which is currently ranked among FIDE's top ten national federations in the world. Both memberships required documented evidence of sustained contributions to the sport, reviewed by executive committees that included a world champion and an international arbiter.
"Every title cost me something: months of preparation, tournaments where I lost and wanted to quit," he says. "I tell my students about those losses, not just the wins. A ten-year-old needs to hear that their coach once missed a checkmate attack in a tournament game and had to sit there for forty more minutes knowing he was going to lose. That is what pressure actually feels like.”
Four peer-reviewed papers and a training room full of kids – how does it help?
Academic work is not a common sideline for a chess coach running a small business. Shymanskyi has published four peer-reviewed articles in indexed journals: the Scientific Journal of Drahomanov Ukrainian State University, Pedagogical Academy: Scientific Notes, and Academic Visions, among them. A 2026 paper examined adaptive platforms for personalizing cognitive load in inclusive chess environments. Before moving to the United States, he coached 120 students at the Lviv Chess Academy, whose graduates have won Ukrainian national titles. Nazar Firman, vice president of the Lviv Regional Chess Federation, has confirmed that the Academy still applies training methods Shymanskyi developed, which keep being refined and updated via research papers on chess coaching.
One of his Lviv students, Oleh Terletskyi, earned the International Master of Sport title in 2018. Many of the students Oleksandr Shymansky began working with have already advanced to Candidate Master of Sports and Master of Sports at a very young age for these titles.
For the 2025 tax year, Chess Club “Lion” filed a return reporting revenue above $70,000 – roughly double the market average for chess coaching operations in Illinois. Surma, a Chicago-based newspaper founded in 1927, published two feature articles about the club's tournament results and community work in 2024. Earlier in Shymanskyi's career, Ukrainian regional television and print media covered his success in chess in such cities as Lviv and Zhytomyr, as well as his coaching activity in Bila Tserkva, where he organized chess championships across every school in the city – reaching more than 3,000 young participants and receiving a commendation from the local Department of Education.
“Writing a paper about chess pedagogy forces you to ask uncomfortable questions about your own results,” Shymanskyi says. “Did this technique actually work, or did I just get lucky with a talented kid? When you put data on paper, there is no hiding.”
Chess Club “Lion” has no second coach. Four branches, 400 students, four tournament seasons of results – all of it runs through one person.
"I learned chess at four," he says. “I've been in the game all my life. My high level of sports and officiating qualifications, specialized chess education, and many years of coaching experience have allowed me to achieve significant professional success. However, I think I will achieve the greatest success by training a new generation of professional chess players and successful coaches. Among my students in the United States, I can see many future candidates capable of reaching that level, and I hope their number will continue to grow in the years ahead. Nothing compares to the gratitude of those you helped to become more successful and happier. For me, it is the true meaning of this work and of life itself.”
Chicago's competitive chess calendar runs year-round, and qualified officials who can handle both a grandmaster's time-trouble protest and a six-year-old's first rated game are difficult to come by.
