Chess.com's 10 New Year's Resolutions For 2026
Last year, we shared Chess.com's 10 New Year’s Resolutions for the first time. It was a way for us to share some perspective on where we hoped to go with you, the chess community, and it challenged us to be accountable to the public resolutions we set out at the beginning of the year.
Just like with our personal New Year’s resolutions, we did not achieve everything we wanted in 2025—notably, we welcomed our 240 millionth member, but not our 250 millionth, and due to upheavals in the chess calendar, we weren’t able to run the Armageddon Chess Championship as planned (though we remain convinced it’s a fantastic idea!). Those misses aside, we did launch Proctor and saw radical reductions in cheating in prize events; we did more than ever with partners, from the Esports World Cup to SuperPogChamps, BlitzChamps, and much, much more; we added animations, haptics, modals, paths, and rewards to make play more fun; we launched Chess.com/courses; and most importantly of all, despite record traffic, the site has been more stable than ever.
This year, we are taking up the challenge once again. Here are Chess.com's 10 New Year’s Resolutions for 2026.
- Run The Cleanest Online Chess Events Ever
- Tackle Abuse and Toxicity
- Make Coach More Exciting
- Make Chess.com More Social
- Give You Oodles of Chess Data
- 1 Million Puzzles
- New Bot Experiences!
- Host Our Most Exciting Live Chess Event Ever
- Release New Features For Improvers
- Give The Chess Community Even More Transparency
1. Run The Cleanest Online Chess Events Ever
In 2025, we launched our most significant step toward cheating prevention in prize events and released Proctor—our Fair Play browser which is required for play in most prize events. Since September 2nd when Proctor was fully rolled out, we have seen a massive reduction in cheating in Titled Tuesday and other prize events which use Proctor. The rollout has been bumpy at times, and we look forward to further improving the player experience on Proctor in 2026, but we see the successful rollout of Proctor as a revolution in Fair Play and are excited to host a full year of the safest and cleanest online chess events ever.
2. Tackle Abuse and Toxicity
Abuse and toxicity are a problem online, and Chess.com has its fair share of bad sports and abusive players. We have systems in place to moderate behavior against our policies and to allow members to report abuse and manage their experience, choosing who can and can't chat with them. Still, we can do better. Next year, we look forward to implementing new protections and AI systems to make Chess.com a safer and kinder space by detecting and preventing more abusive messages and other types of content and behaviors that may violate our terms of service. We are also working on new systems to better educate the many new players joining Chess.com about good sportsmanship, as well as providing all users with greater control over their social settings to create the experience they want on the platform.
3. Make Coach More Exciting
2025 was a big year for Chess.com's coach feature. We launched Play Coach, Voice for Coach, Choose Your Coach, and much more. Still, we are not done yet, and there’s a lot more in the pipeline for Coach! Stay tuned for new coaches coming throughout the year as well as features that will make learning with Coach more fun, more interactive, and more personal!
4. Make Chess.com More Social
Many of you have great friendships and relationships through chess. People you've known for decades and against whom you've played countless games. To date, it's been hard to keep track of your friends on Chess.com, knowing when they reach new milestones, publish content, and more. In 2026, we'll make Chess.com both more social and easier to connect with your friends!
5. Give You Oodles of Chess Data
Chess.com has BILLIONS of games played every year—this year alone, 6.7 billion games were played on our play server. Many of you are contributing thousands of games each year of your own. The wealth of data on site is thrilling, but the sheer volume of data has meant that we haven't been able to make much of it accessible so far. In 2026, that will change, and you can look forward to seeing new stats, new game data, and new ways to get insights about your play, your brilliant moves, and more!
6. 1 Million Puzzles
We've been working hard on the Chess.com puzzle infrastructure to make puzzle ratings more accurate, both for solvers, and for the puzzles themselves! Earlier this year we released a major update to puzzles, and in 2026, we'll be building on our new puzzle infrastructure by expanding our puzzles database with more reliably rated puzzles from the billions of games on Chess.com. Watch for this and other fun features in puzzles in the new year!
7. New Bot Experiences!
Our monthly bots are one of the most popular features on Chess.com. From Mittens to leftover turkey, bots provide a fresh, fun, and low-stress way to enjoy chess. In 2026, and sooner than you might think, we are making major upgrades to Chess.com's monthly bots. We won't say more now, but we think you will really like it.
8. Host Our Most Exciting Live Chess Event Ever
At Chess.com, we are committed to the idea that live chess is meant to be played in front of a screaming, ecstatic audience—an audience in the room with the players, an audience that cheers, that claps, that thrives on the energy of the immortal game and its greatest players. We are determined to make this dream a reality and host the most exhilarating live chess event in Chess.com history at the 2025 Speed Chess Championship Finals in London. Be there.
9. Release New Features For Improvers
At the end of 2022, we acquired Play Magnus and brought Chessable into the Chess.com ecosystem. In 2025, we released Chess.com Courses, making the great content from Chessable Courses available to more people than ever before. As we’ve done this, we’ve had to put new feature ideas for Improvers on hold, but in 2026, we are excited to release new features to make it easier than ever for you to organize your courses and accelerate your learning. Mastering your openings will be easier than ever before.
10. Give The Chess Community Even More Transparency
We've always prided ourselves on being a transparent company—after all, we are telling you exactly what we hope to achieve next year! We intend to be even more open in 2026, and not just by having Danny overshare while the PR team panic sweats in the background. In 2025, we launched our quarterly Board Report (get it?). We'll be continuing that as well as publishing new blogs from different teams, hosting AMAs with staff, and more. Chess is for everyone, and we are excited to share our journey at Chess.com with all of you.
What are your New Year's Resolutions? Post them in the chat and be sure to tell us what you'd like to see on Chess.com in 2026!
