Caveman Chess Festival Updates!

Ratings: Rating results should start coming out today. Typically, the Festival starts seeing results a day or two after Festival weekend for the following reasons:

• When an event occurs at the end of the month, FIDE rating submissions take priority due to the very short time required by FIDE at month end.

• Additionally, the release of national championships is handled by US Chess (not the organizers) as a final step.

• Given that, it's important to remember that US Chess is currently busy starting the US Open and other related national championships.

• US Chess has also recently received some national championships from St. Louis, which adds to their workload.

The Festival events present unique challenges compared to our other tournaments each year, since the St. Louis Championships, the US Open, and month end are typically happening for the festival - situations which are different from nearly all other events. As a result, this brief delay is common for the Festival events.

 Rating results should start coming out today for the various events.

Results Posting and Prizes

As announced at the tournament, we anticipate posting results and prizes by end of day 7/29 if not earlier. We do our best to do this as quickly as possible. Please keep the following in mind:

• Be aware of all the conditions noted above, which impact the timing of getting things online.

• Most tournaments do not have age prizes, and so tournament management software typically has limited ability to calculate age prizes in an open event. This year we started developing special software to assist with this - and this year represented the first time that this software was used during the event. We will be developing more for 2026 to continue to make the process both more efficient and more effective.

• This is a large event that involves a great deal of repacking and moving. After seven hours of work - we had come close to completing restoring most equipment. Note the empty boses and the few boses left to unpack.

U.S. Open/Championship Tourneys Bus

The bus trip was successful and arrived on time. Those who had to cancel at the last minute should see their refunds just before or just after the weekend of 8/9.

Day Camps

Caveman Chess offers day camps throughout the summer, with $100 off the weekly price for all summer camps as part of our summer Grand Opening. This means a cost of only $350 for an all-day camp. Remaining camp weeks in our 222 S. Prospect, Park Ridge, IL facility are:

August 4 - 8 August 11 - 15

Unscheduled Event “Ticket” Sales

Tournaments, Camps & Instruction

The chess industry has seen relatively few “flash” sales for chess services such as tournaments, camps, or instruction. This is understandable because organizers want to be fair and want to be perceived as fair by their clientele.

But chess is also like many other “ticketing” industries, where empty seats represent lost revenue and, over time, increased costs for everyone. Airlines, hotels, ticketing agencies, and businesses with fixed fees and empty seats are inefficient. So many other companies acceptably run flash sales at various times to encourage clients to use the available services, maximizing clients and revenue at any time. Businesses like Trivago make a living repurposing empty seats.

Caveman Chess wants to be financially efficient and continue to bring you the best experiences possible. Generally, the more players, campers, or students, the better the experience.

Consequently, Caveman Chess will sometimes have flash sales.

A flash sale does not represent a refund opportunity to an already registered player.

By registering early, you guarantee your price and your place in the event. We don’t know up front if we will have flash sales, and refunding existing “seats” undermines the purpose of a flash sale. Feel free to sit out until the last moment to see if we have a sale—but if we don’t, understand that you may end up paying a higher price rather than a lower one.

2026 Caveman Chess Festival

It’s not every day of the week you can chat with Grandmasters about chess over lunch…. Yury Shulam and Boris Avrukh at the Caveman Chess Camp 2025.

We are currently working on plans for 2026 and hope to announce them before Labor Day.

Our target week is