Tamer Karatekin

Tamer Karatekin is a Turkish national chess champion, a children’s chess coach, and an AI educator. He is also a technology professional whose primary focus is on the integration of artificial intelligence systems with chess. He is also a designer and curator of chess-related art projects.

He holds the World Chess Federation titles of FIDE Master (1997), FIDE Trainer (2015), and FIDE School Instructor (2016). Ahead of the 2000 World Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, he won the Turkish Chess Championship in 2000. He competed as the first board for MIT’s chess team where his team tied for third place at the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Championship held in late December 2001.

Chess career Tamer Karatekin was born in the Macedonian region of Yugoslavia in 1981 and grew up in Oldtown Fatih, Istanbul. He learned chess from his father and his grandfather.

Karatekin won the Turkish Chess Championship in 2000 with a 2-point lead (10/13), ahead of the 2000 World Chess Olympiad in Istanbul.

During his studies at MIT, he competed as the first board player of MIT's chess team, including in matches against rival universities such as Harvard and Caltech. In 2001, his team tied for third place at the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Championship.

During the 2014–2015 academic year, he served as a compulsory chess lesson teacher for 300 primary school students (ages 7 and 8) at Istanbul Technical University Foundation Schools. and organized youth tournaments in collaboration with the Boylston Chess Club.

He served as the technical project coordinator and AI curriculum lead of the EU-funded Erasmus+ shatranj.ai project, which connects chess with artificial intelligence and technology education.

Design and exhibitions Karatekin is the designer of the ŞAHÎ chess set and related chess iconography, where each chess piece embeds symbols from the names chess pieces have been called in different languages. He has been a co-curator of the history exhibition project focused on historic board games and chess piece designs, SHATRANJ.ART, first displayed at the Hagia Sophia campus of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University.

Professional career Karatekin holds a MicroMasters credential in Data, Economics, and Development Policy from MIT.

He is a dual career sportsman and served as a product manager for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Observability Group.

Karatekin has given talks on the history of chess, artificial intelligence, and education. He has spoken at TEDxBoston He also presented a speech to the Moroccan Data Scientists community. He was also a contributor to the academic workshop EduAI-20.