Entrepreneur David Kramaley, 29, is the founder of Chessable, an online resource which allows chess players to learn from an international roster of experts. He recently secured £96,000 in funding for the start-up. David, who lives in West Swindon, is married to Annelise. The couple have a one-year-old daughter, Amelie.

CHESS simulators, as anybody with even a passing knowledge of the game knows, have been around for many years.

David Kramaley is understandably anxious to stress that Chessable is something entirely different.

“Traditionally when you played a chess computer it would mainly be just playing against the programmer, and the programmer would either damp it down or increase the computer level.

“It feels a bit unnatural and I think’s that’s why most people still prefer to play against human opponents.

“So what we are doing is taking the chess books that have been written, that teach you why some moves are good and some are bad, and instead of you having to read the book, we’re letting you practice it live as you go through it page by page.

“It’s actively repeating what the book is teaching you, and what that lets us do is keep track of the things you’ve learned well and the things you haven’t learned well.

“What that means is that if you get something wrong you have an opportunity to look in more depth or practice it again to make sure you understand why you’re getting it wrong and what you can do to improve your chess.

“The things you’re getting right are put to the side so you don’t have to look at them, so you’re saving time.

“Chess is such a complicated game that if you had to review everything all the time you’d basically be studying chess every minute of the day.”

The key books on the site are by players of Master rank and above, and the number of top players joining the Chessable roster grows steadily.

There’s International Master and YouTube chess star Christof Sielecki, for example, and Grandmaster Rafael Leitão - “He’s the number one in Brazil, and Brazil is a very big country, so that’s pretty good!”

There is instruction for beginners, but the bulk of the information is aimed at people who want to improve existing skills.

“We make it interactive and easy and fun to learn.”

David’s personal history, like that of the game he loves, is international.

Born in Rostov, Russia, he is the son of an Ecuadorian father and a Russian mother.

David, who has a younger brother, grew up initially in the highlands of Ecuador and then in New York City, where he attended university.

He later moved to London and then Swindon, where he greatly prefers the lifestyle to the capital’s commuting, traffic, high living costs and relative lack of greenery.

Fascinated by computers and the internet from an early age, he began devising projects.

“It was mainly the fun and the reward that comes from building something yourself.

“I’ve been doing this since I was 13, just tinkering around.

“I made small web pages that nobody saw or only two people visited, and progressively I got better and better, messing around, getting my next idea, seeing if people liked it.

“I put it down to the freedom you get from learning computer programming.

“It’s something I think everybody should be taking up because everything has a computer in it nowadays.

“It’s the freedom to tinker and to fail and to get better and keep trying, really.”

He has spent much of his career making video games. His company, Sharkius Games, was behind successful Facebook offerings such as city-builder Metropolis and an official tie-in game involving Tatty Teddy, the cute bear whose images and toys can be seen in many greetings card shops and department stores.

David took up chess seriously in 2013, having been taught the moves as a child.

“I just happened to make a friend who was playing.

“He challenged me to a game.

“I lost, I lost again and the competitive edge in me said, ‘Well, hold on a second.’

“Then I started to win, and I thought, ‘I need to play more to get better.’

“I saw there were a lot of really good instructional books, and I read some of them.

“My problem was that as I was playing I didn’t remember any of it – and I was still losing!

“When you’re reading it, you’re thinking, ’Yeah, this is good, I’m learning.’ But then when it’s time to play a game, you’re thinking, ‘I’ve forgotten everything – why?’

“The reason is - if you look at psychology – there’s a big difference between passive learning and active learning. It’s almost as if you’re targeting two different parts of the brain. If you’re learning something passively, the moment that it needs to be active you’re accessing a different set of information and it’s not there.

“That’s why making people actively learn the contents of these chess books works so well.”

David hopes eventually to use the Chessable learning model in other disciplines, such as the hard sciences, mathematics and languages.

He is a firm believer in chess as a force for good.

“Certainly, if I sit down and think about it carefully, I would say that, yes, there are a lot of correlations between business, chess, life in general.

“It teaches you to be patient, it teaches good decision-making, it teaches responsibility for what you’ve done – when you make a move, the repercussions are there.

“It teaches you time management, which I think is a very important skill in this day and age.

“Chess is competitively mostly played with a clock, so the results are usually down to who gets the time pressure first.

“If you didn’t have a clock you would just think for a day, but because there is a time element involved, just like in real life you have to always be managing time.

“Should I spend my time here to make a good decision or should I save my time and just go with my gut instincts?”

Something else David strongly believes is that it is never too late for anybody to learn.

“You just have to find the time to go and do it and your brain will eventually show you the results.”

Chessable is at www.chessable.com