Online, on Zoom, Monday to Thursday evenings and twice on Sundays. Small groups, grouped by level. A student can attend as many sessions in a week as they like.

In person on Saturday mornings in Houston, in three levels, from a half-hour beginner class to an advanced hour.

Private lessons, one to one, by arrangement. Lesson notes and a shared study follow every session.

To ask about a class or a time, write to jeffreyashton@gmail.com, or see pandachessacademy.com for the current schedule.

He moved from Dallas to Houston at the start of 2005 and was coaching at three schools within weeks. Some of those rooms he is still teaching in, two decades on.

• West University ElementaryJanuary 2005
• Annunciation Orthodox SchoolJanuary 2005
• T.H. Rogers Schoolearly 2005
• Katy Scholastic Chess ClubAugust 2005
• The Village SchoolAugust 2006

The first Zoom class was on Thursday, March 19, 2020, the week the schools closed. By the following Monday there had been ten. The classes never stopped.

Since then, something like twenty-seven hundred online sessions: group classes most evenings of the week, Sunday classes, summer camps, and private lessons in between.

• 2020about 400, from March 19
• 2021about 400
• 2022about 400
• 2023about 400
• 2024about 400
• 2025about 400
• 2026about 340, so far

Estimates, built from the class schedule each semester, the Zoom meeting history, the recording notices in the inbox, and Jeff's own count of about four hundred a year.

National Master, US Chess. Regular rating 2267.

Tournament director for 951 rated events with 22,505 player entries, from 2008 to today, all under Panda Chess Academy.

University of Texas at Dallas on a full chess scholarship. Pan-American Intercollegiate champions as a freshman, the first Final Four of College Chess as a sophomore. B.S. in Psychology, magna cum laude, 2003.

Played his first rated game in 1991, in Michigan: 207 rated events over the eighteen years that followed.

Writes for ChessBase.