Here At Last! New Chess Lessons!

Today we are thrilled to release a brand new Lessons feature to Team Beta, before bringing it to the world at large, hopefully very soon! Please note: This is NOT just a bunch of new content for our current OLD lessons product (a.k.a. Chess Mentor): The whole feature and user experience has been created from scratch to make learning chess easy, interactive, visual, and fun!

To reach these lessons, just go to "Lessons" in the nav bar (or www.chess.com/lessons). The old/previous lessons are linked to from there, or at www.chess.com/mentor.

The new Lessons include a structured curriculum of topics, spanning four levels ("New to Chess" through "Advanced") and 18 Courses on all chess topics, designed to take a player completely new to the game all the way through to advanced topics and themes.

All new Lessons are composed and narrated by NM Dane Mattson, your new personal chess coach! Each Lesson includes a preliminary video in which Dane will illustrate key concepts, followed by 5-10 Challenges, with questions and positions to test and expand your learning! You'll get Dane's feedback on every move so you're never in the dark, with most moves (right or wrong) getting focussed commentary and advice.

Scoring is light and focussed on fun. You will earn one to three Crowns for each attempt. Try to avoid wrong moves (and to a lesser extent, getting hints) to maximize your score. No pressure though. You can retry whenever you like, and only your highest score matters in the end.

(If you are a fan of our old Lessons, be not afraid! We haven't removed them and we don't plan to. You can still find them by category at the bottom of the new Lessons home page, or by themselves at chess.com/mentor. In future, we'll start migrating the best of these to the new design. We may even take some of our best Videos and add challenges to turn those into new Lessons too!)

The new Lesson experience is landing on web today, on iOS in January, and on Android in March. Members around the world will also be happy to know that these new Lessons will be translated into a number of languages besides English - starting with Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian coming soon!

Here's how access to the new Lessons feature lines up with memberships: Basic users have access to all "New to Chess" Lessons. Gold users have access to all those, plus "Beginner" Lessons, as well. Platinum users can additionally do the "Intermediate" units, and of course, Diamond users have unlimited access. (Note that this is all completely unrelated to access to our old Lessons, which has not changed.)

This feature has been in the works for a while, and we're very happy to see it in beta at last! Please let us know what you think in the Comments - or if you do find something broken or that you think could be improved, please use the "?" at the lower left of the page to "Report a Bug" or "Make a Suggestion."

Thank you so much, and happy New Year!