Chess 2023: Summary
Forget about the thumbnail. It's a bit glitchy don't ask me why.
In 2023, Chess has continued to captivate and engage the minds of millions as the community remains vibrant and enables people of all backgrounds to play. Being an ancient game from the 6th century AD, lots of strange and important events have occurred, and with 2023 banished into the shadow realm, it'll be time to prepare for lots of action in this leap year.
But "What exactly happened in 2023?" you ask? Loads! In this blog, you can sit back, relax and eat some nostalgic popcorn as I'll share you all of the most important events that have happened in Chess in 2023!
Mittens
Just in case you don't know, every month,Chess.com releases bots on the Computer page based on a certain theme. It could be anything, from general topics to holiday traditions to the latest trend!
On New Year's Day on 2023, Chess.com released the Cat Bots, with 5 cats for all Chess levels, but one stood out from them all... MITTENS! Despite having an ELO of 1 which made it less intimidating, It was a demonic cat who acts creepy and plays like an engine! Millions of players have succumbed to this beast, including the best grandmasters in the world, GM Magnus Carlsen and GM Hikaru Nakamura. In simple words, it was unbeatable by humans. If you wanted to win, you would have to use an engine and cheat.
Top: The Mittens bot
Bottom: All of the remaining cat bots (from left to right) Scaredy Cat, Angry Cat, Mr. Grumpers, Catspurrov (Get it?!) and Mittens
However, on February, it disappeared. Many were sad and were protesting to bring them back and Chess.com waited until December to answer their prayers by placing it as "Best of 2023" along with a few other bots.
Additionally, Chess.com also made Mittens a plush which you can find on the merch store and buy it right now and take over the world with Mittens!
Look at this plush! It's so cute...
Kids Beat Up Levy In Chess
In 2023, little stars have been rising to the point where little kids are titled players! People say Chess is the game where children beat adults but IM Levy Rozman? Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess) got beaten in Chess by 2 kids named Tani Adewumi (13 years old. Not really a "kid" age but he became NM at the age of 10) and Faustino Oro (Who is 10 years old) and as of writing this, in Blitz, Tani has an ELO of 2317 and Faustino has 2357. You probably have lower than that! Levy has 2683 ELO, so it should be an easy win for Levy here right? Wrong!
In front of all of his fans, he lost to both of these kids, damaging his fame. Sure, he put up a good fight, but it wasn't enough for those rising Chess prodigies. Also, we learn that GothamChess is... an expert at spotting types of cars by their tail lights? Can you do that?
Since reviewing everything would take forever, I'll just show you one game against each boy and I won't go into detail. I'll let you see them for yourself:
Pictures of rising stars Tani Adewumi (top) and Faustino Oro (bottom).
Chess.com's Weirdest Collaborations
Last year, Chess.com decided to make collaborations with other companies for economy stuff. There were two main collaborations: with Clash Of Clans (On September) and Duolingo (On November). For each month, new bots would be launched for each one.
With the Clash of Clans collaboration, Chess.com made up a new variant called Spell Chess. If you've never played before, watch this video to learn how to play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBREypW5bG8&ab_channel=TripleSGames
Additionally, in the mobile games, you could get in-game currency by solving Chess puzzles of a variety of difficulties for crazy prizes such as 200,000 gold, FOR 1 PUZZLE! There were also 4 new game modes in Clash Royale since it's a Supercell game too: Royal-er Recruiters, Chess Royale, Mirror Mirror and Prince's Revenge, along with new emotes, tower skins and other customizables related to Chess.
Design of limited edition Chess tower skin in Clash Royale.
Finally, of the important changes, Chess.com released bots of them, from an easy Barbarian to a difficult Archer Queen, they could give players of different skill levels a challenge, even for Grandmasters!
Chess.com Clash Of Clans bots (Not ordered by difficulty)
Also, Chess.com made a collaboration with Duolingo. Not as much happened since it's not really a game but it made people make memes about it!
Like the Clash collaboration, you could get rewards by doing tasks but it's the other way around. If you get good scores and do lessons on Duolingo, you get Diamond Membership on Chess.com. Everyone would love that, no? Also, on November, they released daily streaks so they can copy Duolingo and make sure you don't miss a single day of Chess.
Finally, like Clash, they released bots too, but one stood out, the green owl (who some people think is a frog) himself, the mascot of the app, DUOLINGO! He worked differently than other bots: if you play an opening that contains a language in it (eg: Dutch Defence, Ruy López), he'll go full DEMON mode and will get so angry that he'll destroy you and embarrass you. Otherwise, he's just looking for a fun match. Basically, the more angry you make him, the tougher he'll play against you, and certain factors affect his skill, such as capturing and checking.
All of the Duolingo bots in one picture, including the demon owl who haunts your dreams...
PogChamps 5
All year, people have been begging for this to happen until on August, Chess.com listened. there were tons of new streamers who've barely played Chess before but wanted to learn, including Franks-is-heres, Papalatte and CDawgVA. We also saw some former participants of Pogchamps play, such as xQc and QTCinderella.
The best part of Pogchamps is seeing a bunch of goofy moves and funny results that keep us laughing all the time, even though that doesn't mean they wouldn't put up a fight. Even though the very first match between Franks-is-heres and Jarvis really said a lot about this whole tournament. Frank would just keep yelling "OH THAT'S SO CHEEKY! XD" while Jarvis was quiet the whole game! They were complete opposites.
Surprisingly, despite whatever happened that match, he got to the finals against CDawgVA, where he lost, however, for most streamers, that didn't mean they would stop learning Chess. Some streamers have moved to making content about Chess, and it would entertain the community because of how bad or how good they are.
Blitz Rating Record Broken
In the beginning of December, Magnus Carlsen broke the record of the highest blitz rating on Chess.com, reaching a peak rating of 3340, probably higher than the ELO of 2 people reading this combined! It was previously owned by Hikaru Nakamura, who had 3332 ELO and this crazy, revolutionary even happened on a Late Titled Tuesday, where he scored 10.5/11 (10 wins, 1 draw, 0 losses). As soon as he reached the record, he stopped playing and called it a day, which is understandable as it took him 3 months to beat Hikaru's record.
Here's the match that helped him achieve this goal:
A New World Champion
In April, the World Chess Championship took place in Kazakhstan and there, a new champion was crowned: Ding Liren. He may not be the #1 person in blitz rating but he won that tournament and became champion since Magnus Carlsen wasn't there to defend his title. This shocked people as he's never missed a tournament in 10 years.
He got to the finals against Ian Nepomniachtchi and usually, tournament Chess matches take 2-4 games but NO! This match took 18 games since it was mostly one winning and the other one did the same next match. If there was a draw, most likely the next match would be a draw too! Eventually, it got to tiebreaks, where whoever won would be crowned World Champion and wins the match. There were 3 ties until one where Ding won. Ian was in a state of shock, realizing during the match he was going to lose to someone lower rated than him. After a long match, Ding emerged victorious with this match:
Another Cheating Scandal?
Along with the Niemann-Carlsen allegations from last year, there is another player who has been accused of cheating... Hikaru Nakamura? Cheating accusations are very common, even at the lower or intermediate levels of Chess but his fans (since he's a streamer too) would be surprised if they saw the #3 player who's funny and their favourite streamer cheats in Chess. Even though it did appear that Hikaru was not cheating. Let's look at the story behind it!
Recently, Hikaru's been going on an insane streak, winning 45.5/46 (45 wins, 1 draw, 0 losses) which is INCREDIBLY suspicious, even for a grandmaster, if you were looking at it for the first time and that lead Vladimir Kramnik to release a statement on Hikaru because of his insane performances. He notes that in all of those games, he played like an ELO of 2950 according to Game Review, which is pretty much the same as being rated 3600, doing all of that consistently.
Vladimir's profile highlights his intense accusations towards Hikaru.
Hikaru thought this was dumb and he has loads of proof to back this up:
1. All of his games were played on his stream, so everyone was watching and no one noted anything suspicious because he couldn't and didn't use engine support as we see.
2. He's been playing the same opponents most of the time and no changes in playing style was noted. He played on IM 18 times!
3. Obviously, he's higher rated than everyone in that gauntlet and there was a significant gap in skill level and there was only one other grandmaster who's identity is unknown.
After that, Vladimir threatened to take legal measures against Chess.com for not banning this "scandal" but eventually, it got to the point where the website personally muted him for "False repeated accusations". Later, Hikaru went on another streak where he won 43 games in a row, making Vladimir's statement completely false.
In conclusion, 2023 has been a wild year for Chess as it has continued to rise in popularity and get better. These aren't all of the events but I've highlighted the main ones for you. I'm sure there will be even wilder stuff for 2024 so have a happy new year and after cat-loving individuals and a new world champion, I hope enjoy this new chapter of Chess! 
