Talawanda student wins state chess competition
Isaac Coffin, 14, has been playing chess for years. Now, he's winning competitions, too.
Before he was winning chess tournaments, 14-year-old Isaac Coffin played the game with his family.
Isaac remembers playing chess with his parents and his siblings when he was little, though not too often. He didn’t really get invested in the game until elementary school, when Joe Heilman, a former gifted teacher at Kramer Elementary, taught the students how to play. That was Isaac’s first exposure to the competitive side of chess — each year, the school organized a tournament for students to play against each other.
“If you got all the way to the end, you got to play on a big board, which was kind of like a prize when I was little,” Isaac said.
Since then, Isaac has constantly sought out ways to improve his game, from participating in the Cincinnati Open to taking private lessons and even attending occasional meetings with Miami University’s chess club.
In late November this year, Isaac was named 8th grade co-champion in the 2024 Ohio Grade Level Championships in Blue Ash, tying with a student from Dublin. The championships are held annually by the U.S. Chess Federation and were organized this year by Cincinnati Scholastic Chess. Nearly 30 students in 8th grade competed this year.
“Every time I play a game, it’ll almost never be the same,” Isaac said. “I like the competitiveness to it, how there’s always a winner unless it’s a draw, and I like how you can never finish the game as a human because there’s just so many possibilities.”
Outside of bigger competitions, Isaac still finds plenty of time to play. Cincinnati Scholastic Chess holds monthly tournaments which he competes in, plus he attends some meetings of the Lake Lakengren Chess Club in Eaton.
Tournaments can get intense. Isaac says he focuses solely on beating his opponents during games, even if they’re friends, but afterward he always tries to regroup.
“After the game, most of the time, I go and analyze my game with them,” Isaac said. “I always make sure to have a fun time with them and make sure that no one gets bullied because they didn’t play well.”
For Isaac’s mom, Susan Coffin, tournaments represent a different kind of tension. Parents aren’t allowed in the room where matches take place, so she has to sit and wait for Isaac to come out and tell her the results. She’s proud of how he handles the competitive aspects of the game.
“He’s played with some different aged people that have commented to me that it’s nice that afterwards they can talk about it,” Coffin said. “Like a lot of times, they just leave, but they can stay, and that’s a little more unusual.”
Isaac may be winning competitions now, but it wasn’t always that way. He’s spent years learning about the game both through matches and other methods to improve his skills. One of his favorite ways to practice is by solving puzzles — board arrangements where you have to find the best moves to solve a given scenario. The Oxford Lane Library sets up monthly chess puzzles, and Isaac also finds them online and in books.
From 2022 until this past summer, Isaac also took private lessons from Shr-Hua Moore, a former Talawanda student and recent Miami graduate. Moore was president of Miami’s chess club while he was a student and started teaching Isaac after Coffin approached the club asking about private instruction.
“The first time we played a game, he actually beat me,” Moore said. “My chess rating at the time was 1600, 1700, so I definitely wasn’t a beginner by any means. That was personally kind of an issue, because how am I supposed to teach this kid if he’s already better than me on day one?”
Moore says he and Isaac ended up being more evenly matched throughout the two years they worked together. Besides regularly playing matches against each other, Moore would walk Isaac through master chess games and other puzzles to target specific skills like finishing matches with certain pieces.
As Moore got to know Isaac, he said he appreciated Isaac’s sense of humor. Moore could tell that Isaac enjoyed the logic and competitiveness of chess, and Isaac was always trying new strategies in their lessons.
“Most of the time, if I was beating him, it was because he was trying something crazy,” Moore said. “Nine times out of 10, it did not work, but that one time, it was brilliant. That’s very different from my style, which is very conservative.”
Isaac balances chess with other activities, too. He participates in soccer, basketball and bowling, as well, and Coffin said she has to be intentional about maintaining the family calendar to keep track of all of Isaac’s events.
For Isaac, it’s the sense of competition that makes chess, soccer and the rest worth taking part in.
“I like when it actually matters for something, even if it’s just little,” Isaac said. “I like when you get a prize or it counts towards a score, because then it incentivizes me to actually try hard in the activity.”
