The premise is simple, if a little mad: eighty chess lessons, in eighty countries, from eighty different coaches. A journey around the world — not in eighty days, but in eighty games.
The idea began, as many ideas do, with a question that wouldn't leave me alone. What would it be like to learn chess not from a single teacher, not from a book, not from an engine — but from the game's own geography? To sit across a board from someone in Reykjavik, then Buenos Aires, then Accra, then Kolkata, and to let each place reshape how I understand the sixty-four squares?
Chess is a universal language, but it is spoken with a thousand accents. The Russian school is not the Indian school. A coach in Havana will teach you things a coach in London never would — not because one is better, but because the game absorbs the culture around it. I want to hear those accents. I want to understand what chess means in places where it means something different.
Eighty countries. One lesson per country, from a local coach. Each lesson documented honestly — the preparation, the experience, the reflection. No performance of expertise. Just a curious amateur trying to get better at something he loves, one country at a time.
Some lessons will be online. Some will be in person. The format will vary because the journey will vary. What won't vary is the commitment to showing up, paying attention, and writing about what happened — truthfully, slowly, without shortcuts.
Because Jules Verne set the number, and it felt right. Because eighty is ambitious enough to be a real journey and finite enough to be a real project. Because there are roughly two hundred countries in the world, and eighty is a meaningful fraction — enough to span every continent, enough to encounter the game's full diversity, enough to change how I think.
And because a wager needs stakes. Eighty is the number I have to hit. Not seventy-nine.