ABOUT US

Tamer Karatekin received the FM (FIDE Master) title and his first ELO rating at the age of 16 at the European Junior U20 Championship in Tallinn, Estonia. During his chess career, he won the Turkish Youth U20 Championships in 1998 and 1994, the Turkish Under-10 Championships in 1990 and 1991, the Turkish Under-14 Championship in 1994, and the Turkish Ministry of National Education Middle Schools Championship in 1998.

With the influence of his successes in the chess sport during his Turkish-German high school education (1992-2000) at Istanbul High School, Tamer Karatekin was accepted to Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate student in the year 2000. He studied at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science between 2000 and 2004. While playing as the first board of MIT’s chess team and before, Tamer defeated the US Junior Champion Dean Ippolito in 1998, Harvard Champion Marc Esserman in 2002, and US High School Champion Patrick Hummel in an MIT-Caltech college team match in 2003.

Tamer’s brother, Serdar Karatekin, also was admitted to MIT in 2005 and graduated from the electrical engineering and computer science department in 2011. The brothers have been developing software for chess in schools and training purposes. Serdar was the lead mobile developer of socratic.org from the start, one of the leading ed-tech startups in the world, which was acquired by Google in 2019.

After his undergraduate education in the USA, Tamer returned to Istanbul, where he enjoyed a career in management and entrepreneurship in various sectors, including software, tourism, food, and international trade. As a 2nd profession, he started to coach young chess players and train them for the World and European Youth Chess Championships. Among his pupils, there have been medalists in the World, Europe, World Schools, Europe Schools, Türkiye, and Istanbul championships. His most famous students are U8 World silver medalist CM Işık Can, with an international chess rating, ELO, above 2100 at age 9, and his sister U9 world school silver medalist CM Işıl Can. Sample photos of Tamer’s students can be found on his chess academy website. Based on the results of his students, Tamer was awarded the title of FIDE Trainer in 2015.

During the 2014-2015 school year, Tamer also taught around 300 first and second-grade students at Istanbul Technical University Development Foundation primary schools, one of the first schools in the world to have compulsory chess lessons in the curriculum. Having coached small children both one-on-one and in a group setting, Tamer noticed the need for better personalized chess learning tools for young learners. Following his classroom teaching experience, Tamer led the building of DEEP SEA CHESS, a culturally inclusive chess learning platform for compulsory chess lessons. DEEP SEA CHESS team participated in their school chess platform project and qualified as a semi-finalist (top 60) among 3000 participants at the Istanbul Technical University Seed Incubator program, ranked among the best in the EU and in the world. He continues to run this edtech company based in Istanbul, Türkiye, partnering with local and European NGOs, universities, and public school systems. He also regularly consults private school chains, ministries of education, and national chess federations about chess in schools.

In 2019, Tamer completed the graduate-level MITx Data, Economics, and Development Policy Micromasters program, led and taught by Nobel laureates in Economics, Prof. Duflo and Prof. Banerjee. The same year, he returned to MIT, taking courses across MIT’s EECS and Economics departments and Sloan School of Management. During these studies, Tamer took a graduate-level course on “Artificial Intelligence in K12” from Prof. Abelson and Prof. Breazeal, advisors to the AI4K12.org initiative for artificial intelligence in elementary education in the United States. During the pandemic in 2021, Tamer earned MIT Sloan’s Health graduate certificate while serving as co-president of the MIT Entrepreneurship Club.

Afterwards, Tamer Karatekin worked as a machine learning researcher on projects funded by the US National Institute of Health (NIH) and as a product manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. He currently continues his professional life in the United States. 

As a graduate of MIT’s both on-campus (EECS) and online programs (MITx DEDP), Tamer is an experienced entrepreneur, data scientist, and product manager with a strong background in the education and healthcare sectors. He has presented his research at leading conferences on machine learning in healthcare and artificial intelligence in education. He is the technical co-translator of the Amazon best-selling book “Machine Learning in 100 Pages.” 

As of 2024, Tamer Karatekin is the technical coordinator of the SHATRANJ.AI project, an artificial intelligence curriculum based on historical mind games supported by the EU Erasmus+ Youth program. He is also the designer of the ŞAHÎ chess set and chess icons, supported by the Massachusetts Arts Council with a residency program in the Boston School System. The ŞAHÎ chess pieces and historical mind games exhibition, SHATRANJ.ART was first displayed at the Hagia Sophia in January 2024