Ichesswhiz.com was founded by Dr. Eric Xiao. Dr. Xiao is an IT professional who graduated from Virginia Tech with a doctorate, and he worked for many years on various IT projects in the Washington, DC area. Dr. Xiao is a chess enthusiast. He started to learn chess when his son liked to play chess a few years ago. Since then, he plays regularly online with others for fun. He doesn’t view chess as a game but as a tool for learning skills that improve our abilities to solve complex problems, such as pattern recognition, abstract reasoning, logical inference, etc. He considers chess as a fundamental skill like math for students to study. His vision is to build a platform to facilitate chess coaches and students to easily interact and make chess as popular as math.