Our First Ever In-Person Chess Camp: What Happened in Charlotte

It's a wrap. Our first ever in-person training camp is done, and I am still processing it.

For a long time, Russian Chess School has been an online community. That has always been the point — you can be in Tokyo or Sao Paulo or Stockholm and learn the same way as someone in New York. The internet made that possible, and we built the school around it.

But there has always been something I wanted to create alongside the online program: the experience of actually being in the same room with other chess players, studying together, eating together, playing each other across a real board. That is a different kind of learning. It does things that video calls cannot.

The Charlotte camp was the first time we made that happen.

Sixteen people from all over the world

We had 16 participants join us in Charlotte. They came from across the US and from other countries — genuinely from around the world. Some had been students of the school for a while. Some were new. What they had in common was that they took chess seriously enough to get on a plane and spend a weekend studying it.

That shared commitment changes the energy in a room. When everyone is there because they actually want to be there, there is more curiosity, more willingness to ask questions, more openness to being shown where you went wrong.

The coaching lineup

We put together a seriously good group of coaches for this camp.

GM Daniel Naroditsky needs little introduction if you follow chess online. Danya is one of the best chess teachers anywhere, and his ability to make complex ideas accessible is unlike almost anyone else in the game.

GM Ben Finegold is one of the most entertaining and insightful lecturers in American chess. You will not fall asleep in a Finegold lecture. You will also learn a lot.

GM Kayden Troff brought his analytical precision and depth. And FM Peter Giannatos, who is a cornerstone of the Charlotte Chess Center community, added local knowledge and a very sharp chess mind.

Four coaches over the course of one camp — different styles, different strengths, all at a very high level.

Tournament play: for many, a first

One of the things I cared most about for this camp was that students would get to play real, over-the-board chess — not just study it. So we built tournament play into the program.

For some participants, it was their first rated over-the-board tournament. That is a milestone. Playing online is one thing. Sitting across from a real person with a physical clock ticking, navigating a critical position that only you can decide — that is something else entirely. I could not be more proud of the students who played their first rated game at this camp.

What I was not expecting

I knew the chess would be good. What surprised me was how much the social dimension of the camp mattered.

People who had only ever interacted in Discord or in online class — meeting in person, playing blitz against each other in the evenings, talking about chess over dinner. Friendships formed. People exchanged contacts. Some of them are still in touch and planning to come back.

That is not something you can engineer. At this camp, it happened, and it made the whole thing feel like more than a training event. It felt like the beginning of a community.

What came next

This camp was the proof of concept. After Charlotte, we added more dates to the calendar: a camp in Paris in May 2025, and another Charlotte camp in April 2025. Each one has built on what we learned from the first.

If you are an online student who has been thinking about attending one of the in-person camps — come. The experience is worth it. There is something about doing this in person that I could not have fully described to you before Charlotte. Now I can: it changes how you think about the school, about chess, and about the people you are studying it with.