How the idea was born, and why so many courses and events are free?

 

It was such an amazing emotion which will always stay in my memory...

After a few years, I became a Grandmaster too. During that journey, I got lots of help from great people, coaches, Grandmasters. The greatest thing was that many of them did it for free. And to my question "Why you do that?" the most common answer was “We also had mentors, who helped us, now we help you, the next day you'll help someone else" I like this idea so much! There is wisdom in it.

 

The world is full of evil, but what we need is the exact opposite. What if each of us brings some goodness to the world?

 

The last year (in 2018) I realized, that now is my turn. Many times I asked myself “What can I do for people?” , "How can I help chess lovers?" , "Are there any dreams, that I can realize for them?" One of the things that came into my mind was, "Man, so many chess lovers dream to play against a Grandmaster and never get a chance like I was dreaming when I was 13.” So why not organize that?

At first, I thought to create an event and play with anyone who would register. However, I was not sure that I would be able to do it all by myself if more than 100 players registered. 

So I asked my Grandmaster friends if they would like to join my idea. They agreed with great delight. Here are their names: International GM Melkumyan Hrant (rating- 2660), GM Robert Hovhannisyan (rating- 2640), GM Gabuzyan Hovhannes (rating- 2619), GM Samvel Ter-Sahakyan (rating- 2611), GM Andriasian Zaven (rating- 2600).

Later we decided not to be satisfied with just 1-day blitz games, but to create a community of chess lovers, where we will play with them one-on-one and simul games, organize webinars, have calls and much more.

So we created a closed Facebook group for chess enthusiasts, where our mission was to help them to grow their skills. As we strongly believe that Right Mood generates Right Moves and good results in chess and in life, we easily came up with our slogan "Right Mood - Right Move" and named our group "ChessMood."

After that, the exciting journey began...

 

ChessMood Family

 

By word of mouth, more and more chess enthusiasts joined our group, with whom we were sharing our knowledge, answering their questions and were just realizing our mission. On this way, we met lots of amazing people from all over the world. With some of them, we are even planning to meet this year. In our group, many people found friends and sparring-partners too. 

Day by day ChessMood was becoming bigger and bigger transferring from ChessMood community to ChessMood Family. We realized that it's time to create a website where we can share more value and take ChessMood to the next level.

My best friend Hrayr Shahbazyan joined our team, who is a former chess player and the founder of a big web design and development company. He took responsibility of creating the website, and the construction began.

While our technical team was working on the website, with our GM team, we started to work on the content. 

In our group, we noticed, that openings were the biggest gap of our members and we came up with an idea to create video courses series of step-by-step opening repertoire for both sides, black and white.

We put a very high standard of quality for our video courses, and it took us more than 5 months to create the video courses. Eventually, in our website, we added advanced video courses for advanced players, events like 1-1 blitz games, webinars, and streams to be in closer contact with our members and help them more.

We added an option to have 1-1 training with our coaches, and also we added membership for our members, who can't afford personal coaches, but are seriously longing to grow their chess skills and to step up to the next level faster.

I truly believe, that you should always provide more value than you take and when I was thinking what to provide in the membership area and for what price, I decided "The content should be so valuable, that if I had a child, I would definitely buy a membership for him."

Later we decided to give a big discount for our first 100 members, as they should be the biggest dreamers and ones who desire to grow faster the most!

 

The story of our store

 

In October we had "Right Mood" challenge in our group: who would raise his ELO during 1 month the most, would get "Right Mood - Right Move" t-shirt designed by our designers.

Surprisingly, many of our members who didn't win the challenge asked if they can buy that t-shirt.

Then we got more and more complaints and requests, to create more designs and more products. Complaints were, that in the market there are lots of chessy products, but with very simple designs.

Requests were that we are professional chess players who understand chess lovers needs so that we can create very unique designs.

And in reality, we had so many amazing design ideas, that would be cool on t-shirts, or other products, which our chess lovers would proudly wear or use. So an idea was born: to create an online store for chess enthusiasts!

We invited the best designers who are also passionate about chess, and during brainstorms, we created very unique chessy designs, that nowhere else people can find.

We hope, wearing our motivational t-shirts, will help chess lovers to come to a powerful state, to Right Mood, or lift their mood with our funny designs.

With the educational platform and online store, we do our best to serve our mission - To help our ChessMood members to level up their skills with smile and happiness.

Right Mood - Right Move! :)