Championship. Before that, Nielsen was on Viswanathan Anand's team. While working with Magnus, Nielsen turned to Sher for coaching advice. As of 2020, Nielsen is second in the world behind World Champion GM Magnus Carlsen. In New York, Sher coached in several scholastic chess programs, including, for many years, the Dalton School, whose chess director, David MacEnulty, is portrayed in the 2005 film, Knights of the South Bronx. Other scholastic programs included IS 318, subject of the 2012 film, Brooklyn Castle, and Stuyvesant High School. Sher coached GM Fabiano Caruana from age 8 to 12 – 2000 to 2004. According to a 2002 article in the Lincoln Journal Star, Caruana's weekly regimen – with no mention of school – consisted of roughly 28 hours training, 5 one-hour lessons with Sher, 4 hours playing on the Internet Chess Club site, 15 hours of tournament competition, and 4 hours of solving chess problems. Caruana, as a dual citizen of the U.S. and Italy, holds many distinctions in chess. Notably, at age 14, he became the youngest U.S. and Italian citizen to become a grandmaster. But before that, while Sher was coaching him, he became the youngest U.S. player to defeat a grandmaster. On September 30, 2002, at the Marshall Chess Club, Caruana, at age , defeated GM Aleksander Wojtkiewicz, who then was and ranked eighth in the U.S. In 2005, Caruana, with his family, moved to Madrid where he trained with Boris Zlotnik (ru) until 2015. Zlotnik had worked 16 years in the Chess Department of Sher's alma mater, the State Central Order of Lenin Institute of Physical Education. Grigory Goldberg (ru) (1908–1976) founding Director of the Chess Department had hired Zlotnik as a Senior Lecturer in 1975; and from 1985 to 1991, Zlotnik served as Director of the department. In 1992, Zlotnik emigrated to Spain and settled in The Pyrenees and Madrid and became a Spanish citizen. Beginning around 1999, while living in New York, Sher began training Keaton Kiewra, a -year-old from Lincoln, Nebraska. Sher had been highly recommended by David MacEnulty and Bruce Pandolfini. Sher mentored Kiewra through high school, in chess camps and by phone – two hours a week. At age – January 8, 2011 – Kiewra qualified as an international master at the Berkeley International, a tournament that marked a rare week for U.S. Chess, if ever, in which four Americans, Kiewra included, earned qualifying titles: