Ringing In The New Year At Chess.com
As great as 2024 was at Chess.com, 2025 figures to be even better. Now is the time to look forward to the next 12 months, but not before we also check out what happened in the previous month.
Here's what this update covers:
Events
The events calendar always gets real busy in December, and this past month was no exception. Here were the very biggest events.
- GM Gukesh Dommaraju became the 18th classical world champion and the youngest ever with a dramatic game-14 victory over GM Ding Liren in the 2024 FIDE World Championship on December 12.
- GM Magnus Carlsen took home the Champions Chess Tour (CCT) Finals and its $200,000 first-place prize on December 21. There have now been five CCT Finals and Carlsen has won them all!
- Carlsen and GM Ian Nepomniachtchi split the 2024 World Blitz Championship after GM Volodar Murzin was a shock winner of the 2024 World Rapid Championship. GMs Ju Wenjun and Humpy Koneru, respectively, won the women's sections of each event.
- GM Hikaru Nakamura won the Titled Cup, earning the $10,000 bonus by 4.5 points over Carlsen. GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, GM Denis Lazavik, and GM Gata Kamsky won the women's, junior, and senior sections, respectively, for $5,000 each, while WCM Veronika Shubenkova won the girls' section for $1,500.
- In 2025, the Titled Cup will be succeeded by the Titled Tuesday Grand Prix from January 7 to May 27.
- Chess continues to make it big-time. In the summer of 2025, chess will be part of the Esports World Cup for the first time!
- Registrations remain open for the Spring 2025 Collegiate Chess League until January 9! The season then begins on January 18. Plus, students in India can register for the ICCC until January 12!
Product & Engineering
- This month, see if you can push back against some of our most talkative computer personalities yet and show them a thing or two about how chess should be played.
If you are in tech and would like to join our team, we're hiring!
Community
Our community continues to run strong with partnerships, even more bots, and tournaments. Read all about them below.
- NFL Films Presents: The Game of Chess premiered on New Year's Day on FS1, and again the next day. Check out the full episode now on YouTube!
- For the Champions Chess Tour Live Finals, we partnered with Take Take Take and Rubik's Cube. In addition to helping out with the Rubik's partnership, Logic also held his club arena on December 14.
- The 2024 Chess.com Community Championships concluded with the $7,500 Crazyhouse Championship on December 6, won by NM Janak Awatramani.
Content
The World Championship and CCT Finals were gold mines for our always-excellent content team, plus we introduced an exciting program for 2025: the Improvement Challenge.
- The 2025 Improvement Challenge has begun! No matter your rating, we have the study guide for you, from NM Dane Mattson's starting guide to GM Arturs Nieksans' guide for advanced players.
- Dane also wrote "How to Beat Your First Chess Bot" and we had another fantastic article after the world championship by NM Jeremy Kane, "Gukesh And The Greatest Chess Prodigies Of All Time."
- Cameras were rolling behind the scenes at the CCT Finals, where the contestants traded Christmas gifts...
- ... and got to try some classic (and some not-so-classic) Norwegian cuisine.
Chessable
Chessable released several exciting courses in December—below are just three of the most exciting ones!
- GM Axel Smith's Woodpecker Method received a much-anticipated sequel. Follow the link for details or read more about it on Chess.com News.
- IM Christof Sielecki presents one of the late IM Jeremy Silman's classics, The Complete Book of Chess Strategy.
- The ever-popular Lifetime Repertoires series received its latest installment, with GM Laurent Fressinet presenting his work on the Sveshnikov Sicilian.
ChessKid
ChessKid reached a major milestone on social media, and someone you might have seen around ChessKid in years past was back in the news lately (perhaps even earlier in this update)!
- The ChessKid YouTube channel recently passed 100,000 subscribers. Here's to many, many more!
- Want to know what's on the ChessKid calendar? Check out the article on ChessKid!
- ChessKid goes way back with the new world champion Gukesh, and FunMaster FM Mike Klein interviewed him after the match.
CONGRATS GUKESH!!! 🇮🇳👑 this feels like just yesterday 🥹 pic.twitter.com/ND3Xn3G56u
— ChessKid.com 👑 (@ChessKidcom) December 12, 2024
Fair Play
The Fair Play team is always working to keep Chess.com a fair and safe place for everyone in the community to play—even if that means refunding almost 40 million rating points!
Fair Play Stats for December:
- 683,800 reports created
- 91,792 Fair Play closures (including six titled players: 2 GM, 6 FM, 2 CM, 1 NM)
- 33,300+ mute actions
- 29,300+ accounts muted
- 211,800+ abuse closures
- 39,007,023 rating points refunded
Support
The team has integrated AI into their work, making the first-response time immediate while still following up with human action as soon as possible.
- Average Time to First Human Response: 1 day, 17 hours
- Total Number of Conversations: 28,185
- Average Quality by Member Rating: 93% (new record!)
- Total Ratings: 4,229
Thank you for being part of the world's largest chess community. Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!
Missed an update? You'll find last month's edition here.
