Wrapping Up 2025 And Looking To 2026

Welcome to 2026! We had another great year at Chess.com in 2025, all because of you. As we enter the new year, let's take a look back at the last month of action—GM Magnus Carlsen's continued dominance, our annual Chess.com Awards community vote, our content wrapping up the last year, and more. Here's everything this update covers: 

• Events
• Product & Engineering
• Community
• Content
• Chessable
• ChessKid
• Fair Play
• Support

Events

• Carlsen has now won, count them up, 20 world championships in his career after sweeping both the 2025 World Rapid and World Blitz Championships. Meanwhile, GM Aleksandra Goryachkina won the Women's Rapid and GM Bibisara Assaubayeva the Women's Blitz.
• GMs Ian Nepomniachtchi, Hans Niemann, Hikaru Nakamura, and Fabiano Caruana hold the top four spots in the Champions Chess Tour (CCT) standings. Carlsen would be at or near the top, but he is already qualified for the 2026 Esports World Cup, which all the others are trying to get into.
• Carlsen, GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda, GM Sam Sevian, and GM Vincent Keymer are all having immense success in Titled Tuesday so far in the current split, which is part of the CCT as well.
• Carlsen also took the overall 2025 Freestyle Grand Slam Tour win, but even Carlsen can't win them all. GM Levon Aronian got the best of him in the last Freestyle Grand Slam tournament in December in South Africa.
• There will be a new FIDE Freestyle Chess World Championship in 2026. It will begin January 14-15 with the play-ins—details in the article!
• A new year of Chess.com Community Championships is on the way, and the $5,000 Chess.com Puzzles Championship kicks things off beginning January 15. FM Tymur Keleberda was the winner of the the last Community Championship of 2025, the Fog Of War Championship.
• Registration is now open for the Spring 2026 season of the Collegiate Chess League. Sign up your school before February 6!
• Is it really the new year until the Tata Steel Chess tournaments, Tata Steel Chess (January 17-February 1) and Tata Steel Chess India (January 7-11), happen?
• Tickets for the final matches of the 2025-26 Speed Chess Championship on February 7-8 are still available.

Product & Engineering

• New month, new year... New Year's bots! Play them today.

If you are in tech and would like to join our team, we're hiring!

Community

• The winners of the 2025 Chess.com Awards were announced. As you can see, Carlsen won Player of the Year. In other categories, GM Divya Deshmukh won Woman Player of the Year and late GM Daniel Naroditsky won Creator of the Year. Find out all the Chess.com Awards winners in our article.
• Two huge creators in two different languages, IMs GothamChess and Julien Song, are going to play a match in Spain and stream it on their channels—Levy in English and Julien in French, of course.
• The Improvement Challenge is back for 2026! To make the most of the Chess 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.

Content

• Want to know the best... everything that happened in 2025? Watch our video below, then catch some individual GMs talking about their personal best moments of the recent year.

• And if you're in the mood for something a little less serious, how did the best millennial GMs react to the newest internet memes? We found out.

• If you missed out on the 2025 Improvement challenge, see the previous section about how it's not too late to get in on the challenge in 2026! And if you need extra inspiration, NM Dane Mattson recapped some of the best improver moments of the year.
• Also, if the new year has left you with some nostalgia for the past, you can read about some 1990s chess software that still has its footprint on Chess.com in 2026.

Chessable & Courses

Chessable has an ongoing sale, "New Year, New Opening"—almost every Chessable openings course is on sale to bring in the new year. Read more about it on the Chessable Blog!

ChessKid

• FM Megan Paragua was recently in the ChessKid Spotlight! Read all about the guitar-playing young chess star.
• ChessKid's YouTube channel is at nearly 150,000 followers, about 50% up from last year, thanks to content like this:

Fair Play

 Fair Play Stats for December 2025

• 1,030,293 reports created
• 136,700 Fair Play closures (including 11 titled players: 1 WCM, 2 WFM, 3 FM, 3 CM, 2 IM)
• 2,300+ mute actions
• 2,000+ accounts muted
• 293,000+ abuse closures
• 39,705,183 rating points refunded

Support

Support Stats for December 2025

• Median Time to First Human Response: 26 hours
• Users Helped: 969,325
• Users Helped By Humans: 140,303
• Average Quality by Member Rating: 93.3%
• Total Ratings: 4,477

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.