Another Busy Month Of Chess, Champions, And Achievements
It's been another busy month here at Chess.com, from product upgrades, to the Champions Chess Tour, to the latest State of Chess.com address and all sorts of content, community events, bots, and more! Here's to an august August!
Here's what this update covers:
Product & Engineering
Big changes to some of our core products, another round of bots, and more!
- The Game Review and Analysis tools got a buff. See your brilliant moves immediately and experience a smoother review process in Game Review, or move to Analysis and see clearer computer suggestions and lines. Check them out today if you haven't yet!
- August is back-to-school month (sorry, kids, but it's important!), and we have the bots for you to get ready with. If only we knew how good Eugene is exactly...
- We are always working hard to continue to improve our product for you, the chess player and fan.
If you are in tech and would like to join our team, we're hiring!
Events
Another leg of the Champions Chess Tour entered the history books, as did the first round of the Speed Chess Championship, while the Women's Speed Chess Championship is coming soon. But that wasn't all!
- GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave won the CrunchLabs Masters, the third of four legs in this year's Champions Chess Tour.
- The Julius Bar Women's Speed Chess Championship begins with the Play-ins starting August 12! The Play-ins determine four spots, while world champion GM Ju Wenjun is among the ten invitees, in what is sure to be a thrilling tournament!
- The first round of the 2024 Speed Chess Championship is in the books, winnowing the initial field of 16 down to eight.
- GM Magnus Carlsen is climbing his way up the Titled Cup leaderboard, winning the last Titled Tuesday of July. How far can he get in the last five months? Will GM Alexandra Kosteniuk retain her lead in the super-close women's standings? Keep watching Titled Tuesday every week to find out!
- GM Liem Le won the triathlon at the Biel Chess Festival!
Community
In case you missed the State of Chess.com on August 1, which covered the last several months, check it out here:
Don't have time to watch the whole stream? Read all about the key points here.
Elsewhere in the community we had the Spell Chess Championship, and back-to-school weren't the only bots that came out.
- The L.A.-based band Wallows partnered with Chess.com on a bot that launched July 30! There was even an arena tournament where the winner got the chance to play the band in a livestreamed chess match and two tickets to a Wallows concert!
- Our Community Championships series continued as GM Luca Moroni Jr. won the Spell Chess Championship!
Content
Our video and writing teams continue to produce the best chess content on the web, including the following.
- The Lie Detector Chess series continued with GM Hikaru Nakamura. What secrets were revealed? Or did either he or IM Danny Rensch successfully trick the polygraph machine? There's only one way to find out:
- GMs Vidit Gujrathi and Anish Giri got together to read some mean tweets. Now who could possibly have bad things to say about Anish's Twitter game?
- On the written content side, NM Jeremy Kane asked—and answered!—the question, "How Fast Is A Speed Chess Champion?" while NM Anthony Levin shared his picks for the seven best games of 2024... so far!
Chessable
Chessable released a lot of great stuff, plus one contest was won, and another is still to be won. Will it be you this time?
- It was a huge month of courses, featuring some of your favorite authors such as GM Sam Shankland, GM Maurice Ashley, IM Andras Toth, and GM Simon Williams! Simon presented a Bird Opening course by GM Raven Sturt that you can check out here.
- We announced the winners of the 2023 Create Your Own Course contest: Congrats to IceBreaker and Benedictine! Check out a free lesson from their courses, Killer Kings and Advanced Chess Patterns, today! And remember, you can still join the 2024 Create Your Own Course contest for a chance at a $5,000 advance on course sales and become a published Chessable author!
- With the Chess Olympiad coming soon, Chessable will be featuring 40% off of several courses and writing some feature articles about the players and countries involved. Read more about the sale and initiative here, and stay tuned!
ChessKid
Today's youngest stars continue to shine in all sorts of events. One of them even got to meet one of the greatest chess players ever!
- IM Shreyas Royal became GM-elect Shreyas Royal at the British Chess Championship—congrats Shreyas!
- WFM Bodhana Sivanandan and GM Judit Polgar got together to analyze one of Bodhana's recent victories, and we were there to catch it!
- IM Alice Lee won the U.S. Girls' Junior Championship!
- Bodhana and CM Antoni Radzimski won the latest Kids vs. Stars! They defeated WGM Nemo Zhou and FM Anna-Maja Kazarian.
- FM Tani Adewumi recently won the U.S. Cadet Championship with 6/7! Read about it here.
Fair Play
The Fair Play team is always hard at work to keep Chess.com a safe and fair place to play for everyone in the community.
Fair Play stats for July:
- 304,748 reports created
- 57,352 Fair Play closures (including 11 titled players: 4 IM, 4 FM, 1 WFM, 2 NM)
- 39,800+ mute actions
- 35,000+ accounts muted
- 131,900+ abuse closures
- 22,200,000+ rating points refunded
Support
The team has integrated AI into their work, making the first-response time immediate, while still following up with human action as soon as possible.
- Average Time to First Human Response: 1 day 19 hours
- Total Number of Conversations: 117,807
- Average Quality by Member Rating: 91.1%
- Total Ratings: 5,144
Thank you for being part of the world's largest chess community. Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!
Missed an update? You'll find last month's edition here.
