State of Chess.com: Sixty seconds with Danny Rensch

Just a few hours before Danny Rensch's "State of Chess.com" show last Thursday I saw an invitation asking him questions. As five competitions and more than hundred clubs had just written and posted "Clubs, their admins and leagues on Chess.com: An open letter to Magnus Carlsen" I thought, it would be nice to give it a try:

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With some luck this question made it to the show at 3:44:00. Here's the text:

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Tournamentix: "Chess.com is increasingly causing difficulties for clubs, reliability is reduced, the site doesn’t act neutrally & there is a lack of transparency."

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Danny Rensch: "I love to know more about that: Tournamentix, please send me a message on Chess.com and reference in that message, that we have talked about it on the show. I really like to know actually more about that. I had no idea, that in some way we were not acting in full neutrality and not being transparent in terms, what you would like to see. I want to know about that, because I don't have my hands around every aspect of this company in the way that I've maybe wanted it. That's the truth. And so, if you're unhappy, let me know. If you have your own biased prospective on that, we'll find that out together. So write me in and please include, that we've talked about it in the show, because I have someone who helps me with the messages and I'm sorry about that, but I get a lot of messages and so I have someone, who helps me. Make sure, that you mention, that we talked about it here, so that I get my eyes on it."

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Of course I did this the very next day. Here's my message:

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"Hey Danny,

Thanks for answering to my question about difficulties for clubs, their admins and leagues on yesterday’s show (app. 3:44:00) and specially for inviting me to send you this PM.

I've asked my question on behalf of several competitions and with the support from more than 100 clubs, which are participating in them. These clubs are facing an increasing list of difficulties. Many admins of these clubs are already trying for years to be heard and understood by writing messages to Chess.com's Support, to moderators, Staff members, by creating public forums or what ever else comes to mind – without success.

The biggest of these competitions is the ONE WORLD League with more than 250 participating clubs, which are playing 3,000 to 4,000 daily matches, a few hundreds of vote chess games and live events annually. In recent months handling difficulties caused by Chess.com creates more work than running these competitions themselves.

Three examples: Club admins are more and more rigorously hounded by Chess.com’s spam filter for their usual activities, e.g. sending messages about club events. Some of us still feel free to communicate as we were used to do for years, others easily get warnings, mutings and account closure threads: For them it’s impossible to find out, what they could do avoiding them (except stopping sending messages and finally stopping managing clubs). None of us knows, why this experience is as different as it is. For our competitions this inequality impacts chances and results of clubs.

A few weeks ago GM Thorsten Michael Haub, a very well known, reliable and highly respected club admin abandoned his exemplary France-Deutschland Group (4,500 members, founded 2014) after an automated muting for fourteen days and the usual message stating, that he is showing "a behavior, that negatively impacts the community". He wrote to Support to let them know, that after months of negative experiences for him it’s enough now. I'm afraid, you don’t have heard about this, have you? 

What happened to him, happened to many of us: To protect my league I’ve needed to abandon representation of my clubs already months ago, because this representation creates continuously the risk of being muted. Being muted let disappear all announcements, all forums and with them all ongoing registrations, pairings and results. It disrupts the activities of all participating clubs in the league.

Another approach, just to give a second example: If new matches open for registrations, members usually get notifications. Early in 2023 (and perhaps related to server issues) Chess.com has stopped sending these notifications for all matches with rating limits. In the ONE WORLD League a majority of matches is played this way. Many active club members join matches right after receiving this kind of notification. Without them, many don't join at all.

We had to pause all these divisions and tournaments as many clubs couldn't play with any longer with their usual strength. In this case it took about two months to see notifications coming back. Since three days those for being low in time disappeared, which will impact results in all current matches. Other difficulties like disappeared club infos on start pages or a broken explorer access in vote chess games already last for months ... or even years: Multi Club Arenas started with a lot of unnecessary limits in September 2021. They still have the same and aren’t ready to be used for competitions.

By the way: Chess.com is working on a Club Redesign. An "early release" showed last week, that none of our concerns is addressed until now. Frankly: For our clubs, their admins and leagues changing nothing would be better than the announced redesign.

Perhaps the best example of an unfriendly attitude towards clubs is Chess.com's App. For our members there are many very good reasons to play on the App and probably more and more do so. On the App members will only receive notifications about announcements, newly open matches and personal messages (!). They don’t receive invitations (neither to clubs nor to daily tournaments), notifications before the start of live events or about new forums, new comments to announcements or in forums or to new notes in their clubs. As more members are using the App as weaker clubs and their activities become.

It would be easy to add several more examples as there are really a lot of difficulties. You’ll find some more in this blog post https://www.chess.com/blog/Tournamentix/structural-problems-for-clubs-on-chess-com and also in hundreds of forums in Chess.com’s own clubs like "Help and Support", "Chess.com Feedback", "Chess.com Beta" or in public forums like "Site feedback" or "Help and Support" and in an uncounted number of messages to Chess.com’s Support. As far as I can see, none of these ways is working for us. 

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. If you like to do so, join the ONE WORLD League, create a forum and ask for feedback. I’m sure, club admins would be willing to give you all the information wanted on your way to understand and improve our situation.

Best regards, Bernd"

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That's four days ago now and until now it is as it always is: You're writing to Chess.com's Support or a Staff member and you start waiting, if you will ever get an answer.

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Fun fact: Earlier in the show Danny passed through Chess.com's June Update article and picked a few of its informations to present them. Several club admins and moderators had discussed in the comments to this article about the difficult situation of clubs, their admins and leagues. We were told, that Chess.com's Staff is discussing the issue (and are waiting now, if we'll ever hear about a result).

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My comment about our open letter made it on the screen. Unfortunately, probably no one from those who were running the show has read a few of our comments before they referred to their article during the show again. Why should one check comments before repeating articles for sixty minutes?

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Perhaps that's, what a show is: Don't listen, don't regard, don't answer. Just talk.