History of Chess.com

History of Chess.com

Welcome to another blog today by sushiracer and joaquingarza2011. We’ll talk about the history of this site… Chess.com! We can’t tell you who won the advertisement wheel yet cause there are only 60 views so if you want to enter the wheel say the name of your club or yourself you will be added to the wheel. https://www.chess.com/blog/sushiracer/the-best-chess-opening-moves-for-white-and-black-rated-by-stockfish-and-why-they-are-so-good 

The website name Chess.com was originally set up in 1995 by Aficionado, a company based in Berkeley, California, to sell a piece of chess tutoring software called "Chess Mentor".  Then, in 2005, Internet entrepreneur Erik Allebest and partner Jarom ("Jay") Severson, who met as undergraduate students at Brigham Young University, bought the domain name and assembled a team of software developers, redeveloping the site as a chess portal. The website reached a milestone in 2014, when it announced that over a billion live games had been played on the site, including 100 million correspondence games. In January 2016, Chess.com announced a two-year overhaul of its previous interface (titled 'v3'). The site introduced new features including computer analysis of games, and the chess variants of crazyhouse, three-check chess, king of the hill, chess960 and bughouse. Chess.com reached another milestone in June 2017, as the 2,147,483,647th game was played, which caused the iOS app to stop working for those with 32-bit Apple devices. This occurred because of an integer overflow problem whereby the number was too large to be represented in the number of storage bits. In May 2018, Chess.com acquired the 3300+ Elo-rated commercial chess engine Komodo, which ranked 3rd behind Stockfish and Houdini at the time of acquisition.[15] In conjunction, the Komodo team announced the addition of the probabilistic method of Monte Carlo tree search machine learning, the same methods used by the recent chess projects AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero. In response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis of 2022, Chess.com published two articles that were critical of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and replaced Russian flags with a link to these articles. In retaliation, Chess.com was blocked in Russia. The site blocked Sergey Karjakin, Russian (formerly Ukrainian) grandmaster, over his support for the invasion, and Karjakin in turn supported Russia's block of the website.

And that’s what brought our website to where it is today.      

Sources used for this blog:

Wikipedia