Joaquin Litzenberger

Joaquin Litzenberger

Spanish and Chess Coach

Joaquin Litzenberger was born in Mexico and was raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in Charlottesville, Virginia. Mr. Litzenberger completed his undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Spanish at the University of Virginia and recently received an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Litzenberger has a lifelong passion for teaching Spanish, particularly in the United States, which has a growing bilingual population. His favorite author is Jorges Luis Borges, which he continues to study through original manuscripts. He is particularly drawn to Borges’s philosophical experiments in ‘Kafka y sus precursores’.

Joaquin Litzenberger learned how to play chess when he was 8 years old from family members at home. At age 9, he began competing in Buenos Aires’s scholastic chess cycle on board 1 for his school, ‘Colegio Argentino Arabe’, where he played alongside Argentina’s top youth chess talent and once met former Chess World Champion Anatoly Karpov. Mr. Litzenberger is an accomplished ‘Class B’ tournament player, with a current U.S. chess federation rating of 1705 (August 2023). Last year, he won the under U1600 section of the Coastal Virginia Open in Norfolk, Va in outright first place with a perfect score of 5/5. More recently, he drew 3 games and won 2 games for a 3.5/5 score in the U1800 section of North Carolina’s largest open chess tournament in history in Charlotte, the NC Classic. So far in 2023, he has played in regional tournaments in the Washington D.C. and Charlotte, NC area and crossed the 1700 elo mark. Mr. Litzenberger favors a strategic style of play and his specialty is the final phase of the game -the endgame-, which he considers the ultimate basis of chess understanding. Karpov continues to be one of his favorite players. He looks forward to competing in Virginia’s Championship Section Tournament this fall and organizing chess tournaments in Renaissance School.

Outside of the classroom, Mr. Litzenberger enjoys spending time with his family, reading philosophy, running and playing guitar and chess. He has enjoyed moving back to Charlottesville where he grew up to share his experiences and meet the next generation of Spanish speakers in the United States.