A school for the
long game.
Royal Gambit was founded by three friends — two grandmasters and a learning designer — who got tired of chess education that felt like a quiz show and not a practice.
We teach chess the way it should be taught: in arcs, not bullet points; with patience, with humour, and with a stubborn insistence that you understand why the move is right.
What we believe
about studying chess.
Understand, then memorize.
Memorization is downstream of understanding. We teach the why first; the what follows on its own. You will leave knowing fewer “moves” — and playing more of them correctly.
Practice in arcs, not facts.
A chess idea has a beginning, a middle, and a recognizable shape. We do not teach isolated facts; we teach arcs that hold together when the pressure is on.
Compete with measured kindness.
Chess is hard, and the players who get good are the ones who treat themselves the way a good coach would. No grinding. No shame. Just steady, structured work that compounds.
Royal Gambit started as a Tuesday-night training group of seven players in a Belgrade bookshop. Two of us had just lost a Swiss tournament we should have won; one had just won a Swiss she had no business winning. The asymmetry bothered us. We thought: someone, somewhere, must teach this stuff so the wins are not flukes and the losses are not surprises.
No one did. So we wrote the curriculum we wished we had had — twenty pages a week, six months in a row — and tried it on each other. The Tuesday night players gained an average of 211 rating points that year. We knew we had something.
A decade later, the curriculum has grown into the six courses you see today. The pedagogy has not changed. The bookshop in Belgrade is still where we record the season-opening lecture every September.
Twelve years on the clock.
A Belgrade bookshop
Seven players. One curriculum. The first cohort.
First international cohort
200 students, 11 countries. The forum becomes our second classroom.
GM Voronova joins as head of strategy
The curriculum quietly doubles in depth.
Tactical Patterns ships
Half a million puzzles solved in the first quarter.
Tournament Prep launches
Eight members make their first Master norm in the same year.
Royal Gambit, today
Twelve thousand active members. One stubborn way of teaching chess.
Three GMs, one IM,
one learning designer.
Elena Voronova
Co-founder · Head of Strategy
2587 · 9× national champion · Belgrade
“I learned chess from a librarian who would not let me move until I could explain why. I teach the same way.”
Tomás Reyes
Co-founder · Head of Openings
2611 · World Junior bronze · Lima
“A repertoire is not a wall of moves. It is a way of thinking about move four when the position is still wide open.”
Marta Krause
Co-founder · Head of Pedagogy
PhD · 14 years curriculum · Berlin
“A chess lesson is a story. Stories that change the player are the ones with a clear middle.”
Hannah Park
Director of Tactics
2469 · Asian Junior gold · Seoul
“Pattern recognition is the silent fluency. You will be surprised how fast you find it once you train it.”
Aleksei Mikhailov
Director of Tournament Prep
2624 · Riga Open champion · Riga
“A tournament is nine chapters. Plan the chapters, not the moves.”
Daniel Okafor
Head of Streaming & Community
2342 · Africa champion U18 · Lagos
“The community room is not a side project. It is where most of the learning actually happens.”
A small ledger of progress.
Want to talk to a coach first?
A 20-minute call. We will tell you which course to start with.