Brilliant Moves, Beautiful Checkmates, And Big Announcements

We're approaching the end of the year, but there's still a lot left to be excited about. Check out this month's update for tech improvements, speed chess action, and major announcements coming up.

Here's what this monthly update covers: 

• Product & Engineering
• Events
• Community
• Content
• Fair Play
• Support

Product & Engineering

As Levy mentions above, the Product Team and Engineering Team have made some big changes, including finally replacing /Live with /Play. But that's not all!

• Chess.com/Live has officially journeyed into the sunset. Play is faster, smoother, and aims to give you a better overall playing experience.
• New miss and blunder classifications: The improved blunder classification is more human, in that it must be a bad move that also loses material or allows checkmate. Miss is a new classification (and a replacement for Missed Win) for missed tactical chances or opportunities to punish your opponent’s bad move.
• Classroom v2 and Library v2: We are planning a proper launch around Classroom and Library as a coaching suite of tools, making it easier than ever for you to teach and learn on Chess.com.
• We added 20,859 puzzles to our collection last month, bringing the total to 557,789.
• Vs Computer fans played 44.5 billion million games against the visiting Billionaire Bots.
• Santa and the other Holiday Bots are back in town! Beat any (or all) of them to receive a special festive achievement.

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 Speed Chess Championship, Chess.com's major speed chess event, is heating up. Many of the world's best players are vying for their share of the $100,000 prize fund, and the title of Speed Chess Champion.
  
  • • • GM Fabiano Caruana defeated GM Arjun Erigaisi in a nail-biting curtain-raiser for the main event.
      • GM Ding Liren edged out GM Alexander Grischuk in a closely contested match.
      • GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave stunned GM Ian Nepomniachtchi after an exceptional bullet chess performance.
      • GM Levon Aronian defeated GM Dmitry Andreikin in an electrifying duel.
      • GM Magnus Carlsen convincingly overcame GM Gukesh D with a score of 22-7.
• There are some incredibly exciting SCC matches still to be played in the Round of 16: GMs Nihal Sarin vs. Anish Giri, Wesley So vs. Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Hikaru Nakamura vs. David Paravyan will all be competing for a spot in the quarterfinals.
• The Fall 2022 Collegiate Chess League season has come to an end. Registrations are now open for the Spring 2023 season!
• Looking ahead, the 2023 Pan-American Team Championships will begin on January 4. This is the largest in-person college chess tournament in North America, and Chess.com will be there as an official sponsor! You'll be able to catch the event live on Twitch.tv/chess.

Community

Here are some of the Community Team’s highlights from the last month, and an exciting sneak peek at one of Chess.com's biggest events of the year—coming very soon!

• The Chess.com Discord has had a huge revamp: connect your Chess.com account and get access to special events like AMAs with titled players and streamers, competitions, exclusive channels for chess advice and coaching, puzzles, and more.
• The 2022 SCC Bracket Contest has set a new record: over 15,000 participants have entered the draw to win $10,000 by predicting a perfect bracket! Will we see a winner?
• The community has loved every second of GM Jeffery Xiong's decision to start streaming. Jeffery is currently in the middle of a “Meet The Mods” series, in which he interviews the Chess.com Event Mod team; check it out on his stream between now and December 11.
• FIDE Master (and Jedi Master) James Canty III was our Streamer of the Month for November. Read our interview to get his thoughts on Star Wars, what it's like to play in the IMSCC, and which grandmaster would be the most dangerous in a chessboxing match.
• State of Chess.com returns on December 21 with a huge announcement! Stay tuned for some big news...
  

Content

• NM Sam Copeland produced this article on the 10 most beautiful checkmates of all time, with some stunning examples of "the essence of chess." It's also available in video format above!
• Speaking of beautiful moves, NM Anthony Levin wrote this piece on GM Anish Giri's most brilliant moves on Chess.com. Check out the 10 best examples out of the 82 brilliant moves the Dutch super GM has played on our platform.
• In case you missed it: we recently released 50 lessons on the most popular chess openings, allowing you to master your opening repertoire. Start learning here.
• Lastly, OpenAI revealed itself as the biggest threat to humanity since Deep Blue by showing its ability to create chess-based diss tracks against 1.d4 players:

Fair Play

Fair Play stats for November:

• 35,883 Fair Play closures (including 4 titled players)
• 77,905 mute actions
• 66,734 accounts muted
• 67,994 abuse closures

Our Fair Play experts are pleased to report that the 2022 Speed Chess Championship is going swell so far, and the team is ready to close out the year!

Support

Lastly, a busy month for the Chess.com Support Team. Here are the stats for November:

• Average Time to First Response: 47 hours
• Total Support Responses: 38,202
• Average Quality by Member Rating: 93%
• Total Ratings: 38,101

As always, thank you for making Chess.com such an amazing place, and thank you for the comments you leave on these updates. Stay tuned—your thoughts might be featured in one of these updates soon...