A February Full Of Feats, Features, And Fun
As 2025 gets into full swing and Chess.com welcomes it's 200,000,000th member, we have a boatload of updates for you this February. Events, content, community—it's all here!
Here's what this update covers:
Events
The Chess.com Puzzles Championship and Tata Steel Chess Tournament warmed us up in January, as the Champions Chess Tour and Freestyle Grand Slam begin another exciting season this February.
- The Champions Chess Tour begins February 16 with the Chessable Masters! Not only are $150,000 at stake but also spots in the $1.5 million 2025 Esports World Cup.
- On January 8, GM Vladimir Fedoseev won the play-ins for Freestyle Weissenhaus. Be sure to tune in for the Weissenhaus Grand Slam event from February 6 to 14! With players like GMs Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Gukesh Dommaraju, and Fabiano Caruana, your favorite star will likely be playing!
- We also announced Freestyle Friday, a new weekly tournament, and the first editions were won by Carlsen and GM Oleksandr Bortnyk.
- Nakamura leads the Titled Tuesday Grand Prix as the only person to win multiple Titled Tuesdays in January. From January to May, Titled Tuesday will serve as the qualifier for the 2025 Speed Chess Championship. And don't forget, the next Titled Tuesday to reach 1,000 players will award prizes to the top 30 players!
- The Chess.com Puzzles Championship on January 16-17 had a new winner for the first time ever in its six-year history. Congratulations to GM Andy Woodward for his victory! And kudos to GM Ray Robson as well for his outstanding five-year run as champ—we're sure he'll be back at it in 2026!
- The NextGen Cup, featuring FM Tani Adewumi, Chess in Slums founder Tunde Onakoya, and more players from the African diaspora, is happening on the publication day of this update, February 6. Check the announcement for details and/or our events page for results.
- GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu outlasted World Champion Gukesh in a playoff at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament, the first major classical tournament of the year.
- The spring seasons of the 2025 Collegiate Chess League and India College Chess Championship are in full swing.
Product & Engineering
The ever-popular bots, as usual, plus some new additions to mobile gameplay, highlight this month's product update.
- It's February, so you know what that means: Valentine's Day! But this month's bots aren't all sentimental types...
- The mobile gameplay experience on both iOS and Android continues to only get better as we recently added some new animations! These include new animations at the end of a game and celebrating all your hard-fought victories.
If you are in tech and would like to join our team, we're hiring!
Community
Our 2025 Improvement Challenge is just getting started, and we're bringing you several partnerships this month, too.
- To make the most of the Improvement Challenge, join the club today and check out the club forum, too! Every month, we will recognize the top improvers and share improvement stories. We just recently awarded January's winners.
- The annual Chess.com Awards votes were tallied, and winners were announced last month. Congrats to all the awardees!
- The partnership stars between chess and other sports continue to align: BlitzChamps live at New Orleans on February 7; and Chess.com will also be at the Fan Expo event for the 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend in San Francisco (February 14-16); and a return to the Disc Golf Pro Tour starting February 28.
- A chess tournament collaboration with Anichess is coming—stay tuned to Chess.com/News for the announcement!
- Our Chess.com Reddit sub continues to grow, hitting 10,000 subscribers. Check it out!
- Along with Freestyle Friday for titled players, we've introduced a community version, which began on January 31.
- ChessUp2 boards have begun to ship!
Content
Lots of great content to share from this past month as well!
- Don't miss our new half-hour documentary about GM Wesley So! You can also read our article about it.
- GMs Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Levon Aronian became the latest to join the Lie Detector series on YouTube.
- In January, we also recapped some 2024 action: Check out the top prizewinners and the top Titled Tuesday performers of 2024!
- Plenty of content to support the 2025 Improvement Challenge, including NM Jeremy Kane's piece on the data behind chess improvement.
Chessable
Learning and studying with Chessable only gets better this month, with new courses and a new feature!
- You can now preview variations on the details page of any Chessable course! Read more about it on the Chessable Blog.
- As usual, we also have several new courses that you can preview or buy, including FM Dalton Perrine's course presented by GM Sam Shankland, "Seal the Deal: How to Gain and Convert Middlegame Advantages," and WGM Thalia Cervantes's "Building Attacking Intuition in Chess."
ChessKid
Whether in article or video form, ChessKid has more than just games—although if you are 13 or younger, you should play, too!
- ChessKid recently reached six figures on YouTube. Now over 105,000, read all about the ChessKid YouTube journey in this article.
- You can also check out ChessKid's YouTube playlists, such as "Learn Chess Openings For White," narrated by FM FunMaster Mike Klein himself.
- Also, ChessKid.com recently spotlighted IM Aaron Mendes, the 2023 Youth Speed Chess champion who continues to make huge strides as a player, recently becoming Canada's youngest international master!
Fair Play
Fair Play is always working for you, and as Chess.com continues to grow, this month, we hit a bittersweet milestone of closing more than 100,000 accounts.
Fair Play Stats for January:
- 751,794 reports created
- 100,600 Fair Play closures (including 13 titled players: 1 GM, 1 IM, 5 FM, 2 WFM, 4 CM)
- 35,000+ mute actions
- 30,900+ accounts muted
- 192,200+ abuse closures
- 43,910,096 rating points refunded
Support
Our growth together has also increased the demands on our Support team, who continues to answer the call!
- Average Time to First Human Response: 2 days 23 hours
- Total Number of Conversations: 37,990
- Average Quality by Member Rating: 93.1%
- Total Ratings: 5,892
Thank you for being part of the world's largest chess community. Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!
Missed any updates? Open the menu below for all past editions of the Community Update, or find last month's here.
