Chess.com

Chess.com is an internet chess server, internet forum and social networking website.[4] It is the most frequently visited board game website according to Alexa Internet rankings.[5]

Chess.com, LLC
Chess.com homepage
Type of businessInternet chess server, Social media website
Type of site
Social networking service
Available inMultilingual (53)
FoundedMay 2007
Headquarters
United States of America
Founder(s)
  • Erik Allebest
  • Jay Severson
Key people
  • Erik Allebest (Co-founder & CEO)
  • Jay Severson (Co-founder & Chief Technical Advisor)
  • Daniel Rensch (Chief Chess Officer)
  • Brenan Klain (Chief Marketing Officer)
IndustryInternet
Employees114[1]
URLwww.chess.com
Alexa rank 325 (July 2020)[2]
RegistrationRequired
Users30 million +
Current statusActive
Written inJava,[3] JavaScript, PHP

Chess.com regularly holds prize tournaments, including Titled Tuesdays, the PRO Chess League, the Speed Chess Championships, death matches, Arena Kings,[6] and a Crazyhouse Championship.[7] Chess.com also hosts computer vs computer events.

History

The domain Chess.com was originally set up in 1995 by Aficionado, a company based in Berkeley, California, in order to sell a piece of chess tutoring software called "Chess Mentor".[8] In 2005, internet entrepreneur Erik Allebest and partner Jarom ("Jay") Severson purchased the domain name and assembled a team of software developers to redevelop the site as a chess portal. The site was relaunched in 2007.[4] The site was heavily promoted via social media and grew quickly, attracting mainly casual players.

In 2009, Chess.com announced a takeover of a similar chess social networking site, chesspark.com.[9] Chesspark founders Jack Moffitt and Brian Zisk had already left in 2008 to found the real-time search startup 'Collecta' and were running out of funds for Chesspark. They reached out to Chess.com so as to provide a home for the remaining users.

In October 2013, Chess.com acquired the Amsterdam-based chess news site chessvibes.com, then the number one site for chess news and stories, founded and owned by Dutch chess journalist Peter Doggers in February 2006. Doggers said of the acquisition:

By teaming up with the leading global chess platform, ChessVibes is able to leverage Chess.com's impressive userbase and resources to enhance its presence and impact a larger audience. I am pleased to be able to work as a chess journalist on the biggest chess website around.

The archive of content from Chessvibes was transferred entirely onto Chess.com's news service and the subscription magazines, ChessVibes Openings (CVO) and ChessVibes Training (CVT), were merged into contributions of the Master's Bulletin. All previous subscribers to CVO and CVT received free premium memberships and subscriptions to the Bulletin.[10][11]

In 2014, the site announced that over a billion live games had been played on the site, including 100 million correspondence games.[12] In June 2017, 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 overflow problem whereby the devices were unable to process such a high number, a similar issue that happened to YouTube's Gangnam Style video when it hit 2.14bn views.[13][14][15]

In January 2016, Chess.com announced "v3", the two-year overhaul of its previous interface, which included a slate of new features such as Computer Analysis, Guess the Move, and the variants crazyhouse, three-check, king of the hill, chess960 and bughouse.[16]

In May 2018, Chess.com announced that it had acquired the 3300+ Elo-rated commercial chess engine Komodo, then ranked 3rd behind Stockfish and Houdini.[17] In conjunction, the Komodo team announced the addition of the probabilistic method of Monte Carlo tree search machine-learning, the same methods used by promising recent chess projects AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero.[18] Chess grandmaster and Komodo co-creator Larry Kaufman said of the merge that

Chess.com has already helped us by providing additional hardware for testing, making our new skill levels available to play on Chess.com, which helps establish Komodo's rating levels, and by providing various other resources that have helped with the new MCTS mode of Komodo. We already have the world's strongest-available Monte Carlo chess engine. Whether our normal (alpha-beta) Komodo, Komodo Monte Carlo, or something completely different will end up as the best remains to be seen, but with the resources of Chess.com we intend to find out. Speaking for Mark Lefler and the entire company, we are very excited for the future of the Komodo brand with Chess.com

The entire Komodo team joined in the acquirement and are now working together with Chess.com developers and technology.

Tournaments and events

Chess.com regularly holds and sponsors prize tournaments and matches often containing the world's best players.

Death Matches

Death Matches are one of Chess.com's oldest formats, beginning in January 2012, whereby titled players are paid to play a series of blitz games over a non-stop 3-hour period (5-minute, 3-minute(default for new users along with 5-minute game) and 1-minute, all with a one-second increment).[19] To date, there have been 38 deathmatches, the participants of which include the likes of top grandmasters such as Hikaru Nakamura, Dmitry Andreikin, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Lê Quang Liêm, Wesley So, Fabiano Caruana, Judit Polgár and Nigel Short.Default time for new users joining via uplinks or referrals may not have options to select the time and traverse between 1 and 10-minute of game.[20]

US Chess League
Main article: United States Chess League § 2013

The USCL was a nationwide national chess league in the United States between 2005 and 2016. Chess.com started hosting the event in 2013 when USCL commissioner Greg Shahade decided that

Our relationship with the Internet Chess Club has been wonderful and we are grateful to have spent the first eight years of the league at the ICC, but at this point we feel like Chess.com is the right place to feature the league. We are very excited about this partnership and Chess.com is fully committed to helping the league grow and putting on the most exciting product for their members.

Titled Tuesdays

Titled Tuesday is a 10-round Swiss-system 3+2 blitz chess tournament held on the first Tuesday of each month.[21] Many super-grandmasters have participated, such as Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Alexander Grischuk, Dmitry Andreikin, Wesley So, Fabiano Caruana and it is widely considered one of the strongest online tournaments.[21] The first event was held on October 28, 2014, with a prize fund of $500 and was won by Baadur Jobava.[22] The prize fund was eventually upgraded to $1500.[21] GM Hikaru Nakamura has won the most events with a total of eight tournament wins, followed by GM Georg Meier with seven,[23] Magnus Carlsen has won three of the events in which he has partaken.[24]

In June 2018, Chess.com held a special version of the tournament for which the winner would go on to participate in the Isle of Man International which had a prize fund of £144,000.[25] Iranian GM Pouria Darini won the event.[26]

Speed Chess Championships

Chess.com has held three Speed Chess championships since 2016, all involve a single-elimination tournament featuring some of the world's best players in matches that continue on in the vein of the Death Match format, with the addition of one chess960 game each time control.[27] The speed chess championships have by far the biggest prize fund of any online event.

Winner Runner-up Final Score Prize Fund
2016[28] Magnus Carlsen Hikaru Nakamura 14.5 - 10.5 $40,000
2017[29] Magnus Carlsen Hikaru Nakamura 18 - 9 $50,000
2018[30] Hikaru Nakamura Wesley So 15.5 - 12.5 $55,000

PRO Chess League
Main article: Professional Rapid Online Chess League

The PRO Chess League was the result of the US Chess League changing its name and format, with faster time controls and a focus on the flexibility of forming and managing teams.[31] Chess.com has hosted the PCL twice starting in 2017, having a regular and a summer series.[32]

Winner Runner-up Final Score
2017[33] St. Louis Arch Bishops Norway Gnomes 9 - 7
2018[34] Armenia Eagles Chengdu Pandas 12 - 11
2019[35] St. Louis Arch Bishops Baden-Baden Snowballs 10 - 6

Computer/Play a Friend chess

In November 2017, Chess.com held an open tournament of the ten strongest chess engines with $2,500 in prize money. The top-two engines competed in a "Superfinale" tournament between the two finalists - Stockfish and Houdini. In the 20-game Superfinal, Stockfish won over Houdini with a score 10.5-9.5. Five games were decisive, with 15 ending in a draw. Of the decisive games, three games were won by Stockfish, and two by Houdini. Play a Friend - If you'd like to quickly play someone from your friends list, you can click "Play a Friend" to create a challenge for that member

Time (Days per move) - your options range from 1 to 14 days for each move.Game lies between 1 and 10-minute as per move default settings(For New Users).[36][37]

Features

Chess.com operates a freemium business model: main site features are free,[38] but players have to pay to get additional features.

Visitors to the site can play on a live chess server and correspondence style games, called "daily chess" on the site. Players may also play against chess engines (computer chess), and participate in voting games, in which players form teams and vote on the best move. Additional features include tactics training, chess forums, articles, videos, lessons, chess news, downloads, opening databases, groups, live broadcasts,[39] daily puzzles, team matches, online coaching and a game database of over 2 million games.

The company publishes a large number of articles on a variety of chess-related topics, including chess strategy, opening theory and history. Regular contributors include Gregory Serper, Bruce Pandolfini, Sam Shankland, Dan Heisman, Jeremy Silman, Simon Williams, Daniel Naroditsky, Natalia Pogonina and Daniel Rensch.[40]

Users can play a number of variants on the live server, including crazyhouse, three-check, four-player, king of the hill, chess960 and bughouse.

Chess.com has a policy against the use of chess engines in all forms of the game, except where "specifically permitted (such as a computer tournament)".[41] It utilizes certain undisclosed techniques to catch players using engines in games and bans many on a daily basis.[42][43]

Subsidiary companies

Chesskid.com

Chess.com also runs the subsidiary site chesskid.com for chess players of all ages. Chesskid focuses on a child-friendly environment aimed towards chess improvement for beginners to club players. It also has a unique guardianship program whereby parents and authorized coaches can overlook the child's progress over time, to see statistics about their progress in tactics or how many videos they watched so that they can give encouragement and tips on how to improve.[44] Chesskid features no advertising.

Chesskid.com has run a yearly online championship called CONIC (the ChessKid Online National Invitational Championship), since 2012 which is recognized by the United States Chess Federation.[45][46] According to David Petty, the event organizer in 2013,

The online component [of CONIC] makes it unique because, normally, national championships require the players to fly in and stay in the same place. We had to ask special permission for the tournament because it is a rated tournament and there is a much higher chance for cheating.

Chesskid have made agreements and partnerships with many chess associations to bring the educational benefit of chess to children in schools. In 2014, for a trial period, all signups to the ICA (Illinois Chess Association) included a free gold member subscription to Chesskid.[44] They also have a long-term partnership with the NTCA (North Texas Chess Academy) which gives children ready access to online instructors.[47]

See also

References
  1. "Chess.com Staff". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  2. "Chess.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2020-07-12.
  3. "Chess.com chooses Azul Zing to enhance real-time gaming experience". marketwired.com. 2016-04-26. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  4. "Chess.com: A Social Networking Site For...Well You Can Probably Guess". TechCrunch. 2007-07-08. Retrieved 2013-11-30.
  5. "Top Sites in category: Board Games". Alexa.com. Retrieved 2020-05-12.
  6. Daniel Rensch (2018-01-09). "Arena Kings - Cash Prize Chess Tournament For Streamers". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  7. Sam Copeland (2018-02-23). "Tan Wins Crazyhouse Championship, Escapes Mate-In-1". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  8. "Chess Mentor by Aficionado". Web.archive.org. 1997-07-10. Archived from the original on July 10, 1997. Retrieved 2013-11-30.
  9. "Chesspark And Chess.com Put Their Pawns Together". TechCrunch. 2009-12-22. Retrieved 2013-11-30.
  10. Peter Doggers (2013-10-03). "Breaking: Chess.com to acquire". ChessVibes. Retrieved 2013-11-30.
  11. Mike Klein (2013-10-03). "Chess.com to Acquire ChessVibes". USCF. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  12. Pete Cilento (2014-12-15). "Chess.com: 1 Billion Games Served". Chess.com. Retrieved 6 January 2015.
  13. Angelica Cabral (2017-06-15). "Chess.com App Crashes on Older Apple Devices After People Played One Game Too Many". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  14. Keith Collins (2017-06-14). "A popular chess app inadvertently broke the mathematical limits of older Apple devices". QZ. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  15. "Why Chess.com Broke on 32-bit iOS Devices". Drinkingcaffeine.com. 2017-06-13. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  16. "Introducing The New Chess.com (Version 3)". Chess.com. 2016-01-21. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  17. "Chess.com Acquires Komodo; Launches New 'Monte Carlo' Version Similar To AlphaZero". Chess.com. 2018-05-24. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  18. "Komodo 12 with AlphaZero techniques". Chessbase. 2018-05-28. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  19. "Deathmatch historical archive". Chess.com. May 17, 2012. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  20. Klein, Mike (30 May 2013). "Death Match 15: Caruana vs. Aveskulov". USchess.org. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  21. John Lee Shaw (2017-02-08). "Safarli Wins Chess.com 'Titled Tuesday' for February". hotoffthechess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  22. Mike Klein (2014-10-28). "Jobava Stays Up Late, Routs Chess.com's First Titled Tuesday". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  23. Mike Klein (2014-11-30). "Titled Player Tuesday Historical Archive". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  24. Dennis Monokroussos (2017-11-15). "Carlsen Wins November's "Titled Tuesday"". thechessmind.net. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  25. "Announcement of the 2018 Chess.com Isle of Man International". Isle of Man International. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  26. Sam Copeland (2018-06-09). "Iranians Darini, Hejazipour Win IoM Trips In Titled Tuesday". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  27. Mark Crowther (2016-10-27). "Carlsen-Nakamura chess.com GM Blitz Battle Final 2016". TWIC. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  28. Mike Klein (2016-07-01). "GM Blitz Battle Historical Archive". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  29. Pete Cilento (2017-05-02). "2017 Speed Chess Championship Schedule, Results, Information". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  30. "Speed Chess Championship 2018 - Official Information". Chess.com. 2018-08-18. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  31. Peter Doggers (2016-08-25). "U.S. Chess League Becomes PRO Chess League". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  32. Isaac Steincamp (2019-05-22). "PRO Chess League Summer Series: 16 Teams, 16 Stories". Chess.com. Retrieved 2019-05-26.
  33. Mike Klein (2017-03-26). "St. Louis Arch Bishops Win Inaugural PRO League Title". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  34. Devanshi Rathi (2018-04-11). "The PRO Chess League Finals: The biggest event in Chess e-sports history". sportskeeda.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  35. Mike Klein (2019-05-08). "Arch Bishops Capture 2nd PRO Chess League Title". Chess.com. Retrieved 2019-05-26.
  36. Pete Cilento (2018-11-18). "Chess.com announces computer chess championship". Chess.com.
  37. Pete Cilento (2017-11-18). "Stockfish wins chess.com computer championship". Chess.com.
  38. McClain, Dylan Loeb (2010-03-13). "Wherever You Are, a Game Is Just a Point and Click Away". The New York Times. Retrieved 2013-12-15.
  39. "Chess.com, red social para los jugadores de ajedrez". GenBeta.com. 2007-07-08. Retrieved 2012-11-11.
  40. "Video Authors". Chess.com. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  41. "What are the site's policies?". Chess.com. Retrieved 2017-06-06.
  42. (DanielRensch), Daniel Rensch. "Cheating on Chess.com". Chess.com. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
  43. "Cheating at Chess on Chess.com - Questions and Answers". Retrieved May 11, 2017. "We won't disclose our exact methods for catching cheaters (to prevent cheaters from adapting their methods), but it involves cutting-edge technology and human judgement. ... We don't make huge public statements about catching cheaters, but we close many accounts each week for cheating, including accounts for Premium Members who are cheating. We are constantly going through our top players and submitting them to our cheat detection process. ... We think cheating is a terrible disease in online chess in general (on all sites). We have a very strict no-cheating policy and we enforce it with maximum effect whenever we are confident we have found cheating. We feel that we are extremely effective in identifying and dealing with most cheaters.
  44. "ICA Offers Free ChessKid Gold Upgrade to K-12 Members". Illinois Chess Association. Archived from the original on 2018-09-05. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  45. David Pruess (2012-05-31). "The United States Chess Federation – Nation's Top Chess Kids to Battle in Online Invitational". United States Chess League. Retrieved 2013-11-30.
  46. "Bay Area kids look to checkmate opponents from a computer screen". Contra Costa Times. 2013-06-15. Retrieved 2013-11-30.
  47. "ChessKid Gold Membership". NTCA. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
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