Lifestyle & Culture

Chess Camp Aims to Groom Kings and Queens of the Game

Summer signals many things: hot weather, long days, summer vacation, no school and, for some kids, chess lessons.

“Having something that he thinks is interesting and that he works hard at develops a sense of reward,” Susan Murray, a New York University professor, said recently at the end of her 6-year-old son’s first day at Chess NYC camp.

On New York’s Upper East Side and Greenwich Village neighborhoods and East Hampton, Long Island, Chess NYC hosts weeklong sessions for students 18 years old and younger.

“We have some really young kids who know how to piece moves but aren’t good with strategy. Maybe they don’t know how to castle, maybe they don’t know how the knight moves,” said Eric Hai, chess coach at the Greenwich Village camp.

“We work with them independently,” he added. “We’ll let advanced or intermediate students work with the grand master. We won’t put younger kids with the grand master.”

In a world where children seem as apt to be fiddling around with smartphones, MP3 players, computers and other gadgets, chess provides a different kind of engagement, said Myles Savage, 61, who started playing the game when he was 13.

“There are so many other distractions with video games and phones and everything. Chess is something that really involves patience,” Savage said. “Those video games, you don’t have to think, you just have to react. But chess is something you have to think about. It’s life, man.”

Savage was speaking from inside a Greenwich Village chess shop that is next door to Zinc on West Third, which doubles as Chess NYC’s daytime camp for kids and a nighttime bar for adults.

“It helps,” said Russell Makofsky, founder and co-director of Chess NYC, that the Greenwich Village camp is only blocks away from Washington Square Park. “The mecca of outdoor chess” is what Makofsky calls Washington Square.

The location “gives the kids a huge opportunity to not only experience chess but get an understanding of the cultural aspect of the city,” Makofsky said.

Though anyone under 18 can enroll in the camp, three-fourths of them tend to be boys, Makofsky said. The campers are beginners, intermediate and advanced players. The sessions run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Before the camp started in 2009, Chess NYC mainly hosted after-school chess programs during the academic school year, and held no summer sessions.

“We were building a customer base and following from our programs from September to June so there was a need to provide subsequent programming in the summer,” Makofsky said.

Campers do not spend the whole day indoors at Zinc. After lunch, they head to Washington Square Park to play chess outside or just to romp, and then they head to see the goings-on at Marshall Chess Club on West Tenth Street. Their guest lecturers include Rishad Babaev, a chess grand master.