GG El Masry

Karim El Masry has coached chess at a Cairo club for twenty years, sending a steady stream of juniors to national titles while his own playing ambitions retired gracefully into the teaching. The children do not know. Not the current group, not the ones now grown and coaching themselves, not the parents who have driven him home a hundred times, because a coach who is visibly a beginner at something is a coach with a crack in him and he has decided the crack stays private. It started as the coaches' after-hours game and became the sharper passion. He calculates deeply, commits only on clean equity, and reviews a loss the way he prepares a lesson.