Chess.com Update: Over 5 Million New Members

2022 is upon us, and with it, an opportunity to look back at the last three months of 2021. Let's take a look at all of the things we are dedicated to improving, the new features, the updates, and more that occurred. The biggest takeaway? We had a lot of new members join and we will focus on quality experiences for all members in 2022.

• Big, Impressive Numbers
• What Are We Focused On To Make Things Better?
  
  • Quality
  • Performance
  • Trust & Safety
• New Features
  • Play
  • Learn
  • Connect
  • Other
• iOS
• Android
• Fair Play & Sportsmanship
• Member Support
• A Huge THANK YOU To The Community For Your Support

Big, Impressive Numbers

• ~768 million games played
• ~5.3 million new users
• ~250 servers and ~8,000 vCPUs in the cloud

What Are We Focused On To Make Things Better?

One thing we want to communicate about 2022 is that we care about quality. We are focused on improving that and we want to hear from the community when things aren't working well. That means a long-lasting commitment to fixing issues (both small and large) and doing great things for chess players' experiences on Chess.com. It doesn't matter if you are learning, playing, or doing puzzles—we are here to do the best job we can for chess.

Quality

We understand that there are many new features and opportunities we can work on to make chess more fun and accessible for everyone. However, there are also some critical quality issues that we are investing in to make sure our playing experience is the best in the world.

There are three areas we are working on improving:

• Gameplay interface bugs
• Flows and User Experience
• Connection quality, especially for those with slower/less-stable internet

Performance

We are dedicated to improving the performance of our chess interfaces, our network connections, and every product and feature on Chess.com. We will be focusing on performance in 2022 and we’re excited for what we'll be able to achieve on your behalf.

A few key areas we are focused on:

• Streamlining chessboard and user interface
• Geo-distributing gameplay (lower ping, faster connections)
• Optimizing page and image sizes
• Faster analysis and deep engine lines

Trust & Safety

We are committed to ensuring that players have the best experience when playing games and interacting in our community. We've been working diligently on both Fair Play and Abuse moderation to ensure that you all have a great time playing on Chess.com. If you are experiencing abuse or if you suspect someone of fair play violations, you can report them to our team by following these instructions. Our community and support teams are online to help and as you will see in the Fair Play & Sportsmanship numbers below, we take this very seriously. 

If you'd like to help the community more directly, you can apply to become a moderator here.

New Features

Play

• One of our biggest accomplishments was the release of Leagues in December. This feature alone helped spike live games by more than 20% as members were striving to get promoted as high as the Legend League.
• We added computer personality bots for Halloween as well as GMs Ian Nepomniachtchi and Fabiano Caruana for the world championship, then brought back holiday bots in December for the holiday season.
• We continued to improve the experience for members who are in clubs by adding more options to Club Arenas and adding chatrooms to club matches.

Learn

• We launched our new Game Review tool in October, including explanations for every single move of the game, new and improved logic for brilliant moves (!!), and the introduction of great moves (!).
• In November we released Insights, allowing premium members to learn all the details about their chess games on a macro level. Check out the announcement here.
• Classroom, a new audiovisual interface including an interactive chessboard for coaches and students (or just friends) and native voice and video features, was introduced in November as well.
• We greatly improved the user interface for members’ Stats pages.
• We worked on a new Live Analysis
• The latest and best version of Stockfish, 14.1 NNUE, was enabled for in-browser analysis on Chrome.
• We made several improvements to our translations in various Lessons.
• The Practice feature now has options for backing up or playing a different opponent’s move.
• We updated the logic that determines the “Top Players” of specific openings on our Openings page.

Connect

• We implemented a tool to allow members to give feedback on comments and forum posts through upvoting, downvoting, and emoji reactions.
• We updated “online” and “playing” UI and made it easier to watch and challenge other players
• Search was updated with Feature Search, improved Members Search, and the addition of Autofill
• Gifting members became much easier, no longer requiring someone to be registered with the site to give a gift membership.

Other

• GM Daniel Naroditsky became Chess.com’s lead commentator, making his debut during the 2021 Speed Chess Championship.
• We worked on an improved Search Bar feature to help our members find anything they need on our site—features, content, and even other members are now searchable.
• Among other improvements to our /Events page, games are sorted by round and table.
• iOS 3.9.25 (6) was released in November with various minor fixes and improvements, a sharp new icon, and improved logic for rematching Odds games. 
• The Android app received new stats and profiles, expanded bot chat, experience improvements, and bug fixes. 

iOS

• iOS users can now check their Insights on the app
• Introduced Players League—with enhanced game-over pop-ups to show your Division points and rank
• Events web view
• We added the Quick Chat function to the app
• We also worked to add the animated emoji feature to the iOS app

Android

• Puzzle Battle
• Added Insights to the app
• Bot statements
• Android users can now connect DGT boards to their apps (check compatibility)
• We added a standalone analysis feature
• Leagues were implemented on the app

Fair Play & Sportsmanship

• 59,656 accounts closed for fair play (including 21 titled players)
  
• 3,387,676 abuse reports were received
  
• 174,607 mute actions were taken
• 143,721 individual accounts muted
• 126,935 accounts closed for abuse

Member Support

• Average time to response: ~28 hours and 35 minutes
• Total support responses: 104,496
• Average quality by member rating: 93% "Great" or better

A Huge THANK YOU To The Community For Your Support

Every day we wake up and ask ourselves “how can we make the experience better for our players?” It is so motivating and inspiring to watch you learn and grow as chess players and see your dedication and support in our vibrant global community.

Everyone who is playing in leagues, participating in clubs, playing variants, joining tournaments, sharing in our forums, analyzing their games, and streaming chess online—we appreciate you so much! Please accept our debt of gratitude and thanks for making Chess.com the biggest and best place to play chess online.

As a parting note, this type of update from Chess.com will replace the month in review articles and will be published quarterly around the same time as the State of Chess.com.