What Still Motivates This Longtime Top Coach? 'I Just Want To Share My Knowledge'

GM Melikset "Melik" Khachiyan is a coaching legend. The Armenian-born American grandmaster was not only the coach of one of the best players in history, GM Levon Aronian, in the 1990s, he has coached the highly successful U.S. women's team at the Olympiad since 2010 and counted dozens of great young players among his students over the years. Having earned the prestigious FIDE Senior Trainer title in 2018, he is now also a head counselor for the FIDE Trainers' Commission (TRG), imparting his wisdom to other coaches. For all of his achievements, Melik is the October Coach of the Month at Chess.com.

Melik learned chess when he was eight and can still remember the first time his father "opened up a folding chessboard with these strange pieces in it" and showed him. He credits his first coaches, Gennadiy Chubenko and Alexander Shakarov, for teaching him how to study openings. Melik really blossomed after another coach, Rafael Sarkisov, brought him to the Tigran Petrosian Chess School run by Armenian World Champion GM Tigran Petrosian.

In six sessions at the Petrosian School, Melik met the champion himself, and he also met IM Aleksandr Nikitin. Melik considers Nikitin a "legend, to whom I owe most of my knowledge" who "never really promoted himself" but deserves credit for teaching a generation of students. Melik also credits the Petrosian School with teaching him "how to think properly, to make the right decision, and positional strength. It gave me the ability to understand chess better, which I carry on even today."

Unfortunately, Melik ended up a war refugee in the late 1980s. Unable to play competitive chess for a year and a half, he turned his focus to coaching. He took Aronian as a student in 1990, won an award in Moldova after leading their team to the 1992 Under-16 World Cadet Championship, and was coach of the Armenian national team by 1995.

Melik never gave up completely on his playing career, and in just the past couple of years achieved his final two goals as a player, winning a U.S. championship at the 2023 Senior Championship, and helping the U.S. team to win a World Senior Team Championship in 2024. He describes his game to clinch the World Team Championship against GM Glenn Flear as the best of his career.

Today, Melik counts more than 40 players with a national master title or better as among his students past and present, and he has won several awards for his coaching efforts. A short list of just some of the players he has worked with includes:

• Aronian,
• GM Arman Pashikian,
• GM Tigran Gharamian,
• WGM Elina Danielian,
• GM Steven Zierk,
• GM Kayden Troff,
• and GM Andy Woodward.

"I'm always trying to teach something that you won’t find in the books," he says. "But a coach should build his student into both a strong player and a good person. I regret it more when the second part fails, but unfortunately that happens sometimes." He also says that students, for their part, need to "have a passion for the game and be patient in learning."

Asked what he considers the most valuable training tool that the internet provides, Melik responds, "Efficiency. The amount of material that it used to take weeks to learn, can now take just hours. And there is so much information about individual players for matchups." With all that new technologies offer, coaches have to keep up: "Coaching strong kids now requires being technologically advanced. If you tried coaching without using the technology, you couldn't teach advanced kids beyond a 1400 or 1500 rating."

But young students are only getting better, and Melik is very impressed with the accuracy of today's younger players: "Now, it's incredible the level of the thinking of a kid rated even 1700. Most of them are hitting 85 or 90 percent accuracy."

Because of his role of not only coaching players, but also training other coaches, Melik has some more advice for them too. "In some areas of chess, I'm strong and good," he says in an understatement. "But in some areas I may not be as good—and if I know someone has better understanding, then it’s fine to hire them to help a student struggling in that area."

He may now be retired as a player, but Melik will continue coaching for as long as he can. "I just want to share my knowledge," he says. "I don't need to prove anything. My dad used to tell me, if you’re still trying to prove something after turning 50, it’s too late."

With Melik's mentorship, multiple generations of students are better off as chess players and as people, and Chess.com is glad to honor him as the October Coach of the Month.