Emoji Are Back & Enjoy Our New Improvements
Another month has passed by quickly. Check out the latest news and updates from Chess.com as we continue to make your online chess experience the best it can be!
Here's what this update covers:
Product & Engineering
The Product Team and Engineering Team have been focusing on quality-of-life improvements, performance, and a few fun new features.
- Emoji palette on chessboard
You now have access to a floating (and resizable) emoji menu which can be used to select and drop emojis onto your chessboard. It’s a handy tool for marking your brilliant moves, potential ideas, or just for some extra fun. - Help Chess
Help Chess is a special gameplay mode (started via a match command) which allows both players as well as spectators to see the evaluation bar. This was created for Ludwig’s recent chess event, but we’ve decided to keep it because it was so much fun. Note: this can only be used in unrated games! - Improvements to better support Android, iOS, and all clients
The team has made some improvements which allow the client to fetch threats, chat, analysis, computer moves, and evaluations faster than ever before. This results in better consistency, performance, and fewer bugs for game review in-app on mobile devices. - A new puzzle milestone
In August, we grew our number of playable Puzzles by 16,601, taking us across the 500k mark!
If you are an engineer and want to help grow the game of chess, come work with us! Visit Chess.com/jobs to find out more.
Events
The 2022 RCC and WSCC were decided in August, while Titled Tuesday keeps getting bigger.
- GM Ian Nepomniachtchi clinched the Grand Final of the 2022 Rapid Chess Championship, defeating GM Dmitry Andreikin. Check out this article for a full review of the match, which featured pristine play by the seemingly invincible Nepomniachtchi. In total, the RCC had 1093 participants!
- Two players have qualified for the Reykjavik Finals in the 2022 Fischer Random World Championship: GMs Vladimir Fedoseev and Matthias Bluebaum.
- Titled Tuesday featured spectacular participation in August: a whopping 3515 participants battled it out on the board.
- GM Kateryna Lagno defeated defending champion GM Hou Yifan in the final of the FIDE Chess.com 2022 Women's Speed Chess Championship. The determination and attacking styles of these two grandmasters made this match a riveting duel of minds, with the result undecided until the very last game!
Community
Here are some of the Community Team’s highlights, including sophisticated robots and a few words from the team to all of you!
- There are some awesome changes in store for the official Chess.com Discord server: the server is getting a new custom bot! It takes advantage of all Discord's latest updates and comes with lots of cool features:
- Better Chess.com integration
- Easier to use
- Rating roles
- Exclusive perks for server regulars
- ... and much more
- We’d also like to take a moment here to thank our community for being so awesome. You are really appreciated, and every day we are working hard to find new ways for you to have fun with chess and your friends on Chess.com.
Content
Alongside the most up-to-date chess news on the internet, our Content Team has been hard at work on the below deep-dives into chess history and culture.
- Who is the biggest prizewinner in chess history? No one has ever put together a comprehensive, historical account of exactly how much prize money the best chess players have won at the board—until now! So which chess player throughout history actually made the most money by playing chess? The answer might surprise you...
- The History Of Chess: The World Chess Championship is a free-to-watch documentary exploring the history of the World Chess Championship, chess champions, and their personalities. It also explores how the way the game developed throughout the years is a reflection of the world we live in. Backed by in-depth research of thousands of newspaper articles, works of art, and historical footage and images, the documentary brings chess history to life.
- Many talented street chess players learned how to play the game in jail or in prison. From trash talking to chess tattoos, this group of players takes the game to the next level. Street Chess is a five-part series portraying the non-traditional environments where chess has been quietly influencing generations of players.
Fair Play
As well as the below stats, the RCC and CGC Play-in phase wrapped up this month, and the Fair Play Team was heavily involved in both of these events.
Fair Play stats for August:
- 25,449 Fair Play closures (including six titled players)
- 47,625 mute actions
- 41,052 accounts muted
- 68,254 abuse closures
Support
Lastly, some numbers from the Chess.com Support Team. Here are the stats for August:
- Average Time to First Response: 29 hours
- Total Support Responses: 37,475
- Average Quality by Member Rating: 94%
- Total Ratings: 4,143
As always, thank you for making Chess.com such an amazing place, and thank you for the comments you leave on these updates. Rest assured that we read them, and while we can’t respond to or implement every single idea, they give us a great perspective on what our priorities are and how we can best serve you. Stay tuned—your thoughts might be featured in one of these updates soon
