Esports World Cup The Highlight Of Another Big Chess Month

As we enter August, it's been another big month for Chess.com, and for chess itself as the game reaches new audiences. The esports world unofficially welcomed chess to its ranks with the inaugural Esports World Cup tournament. Chess has also spread to basketball fandom as one of the world's biggest basketball stars has begun putting on his own chess events.

But that's not all that's happened recently! We also celebrated one of the biggest days on the chess calendar, International Chess Day, and more. Here's everything this update covers: 

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

Events

• Carlsen won the first-ever chess event at the Esports World Cup and its $250,000 first-place prize, defeating GM Alireza Firouzja in the grand final on August 1.
• The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam continued with the Las Vegas event on July 16-20, where GM Levon Aronian came out on top and earned $200,000 after a win in the final over GM Hans Niemann. 
• The Women's Speed Chess Championship began August 4 and will run through August 29. Women's World Champion GM Ju Wenjun and the highest-rated woman in the world, GM Hou Yifan, are among the participants. 
• GM Divya Deshmukh won Women's World Cup on July 29, earning her grandmaster title as well as a spot in the 2026 Women's Candidates Tournament. Finalist GM Humpy Koneru and third-place winner GM Tan Zhongyi also made the Candidates.
• Carlsen also took down the GCT Croatia tournament in July despite playing what he called his "B-game."
• The Chess.com Community Championships continued with NMs Isaac Chiu and Janak Awatramani taking home July's Bughouse tournament. Look out next for Spell Chess, August 14-15!

Product & Engineering

• Hungry for some chess games? Hit up our August barbecue and play some bots today.

If you are in tech and would like to join our team, we're hiring!

Community

• Our International Chess Day event with Portals on July 20 was a success! 
• The basketball and chess worlds are colliding with a big assist from basketball superstar and chess superfan Victor Wembanyama. NBA players Grant Williams and Quentin Post won a hand-and-brain (with GM Judit Polgar!) and blitz event, respectively, at the Chesstival in Las Vegas on July 13. Then, in his hometown of Le Chesnay, France on July 21, Wembayana hosted the Hoop Gambit chess tournament, won by IM Yovann Gatineau, which also featured a three-on-three-basketball tournament.
• Another major celebrity partnership this month featured world-famous DJ Steve Aoki's brand-new playable chess bot. 
  
• To make the most of the ongoing Chess Improvement Challenge, join the club today and check out the club forum, too! Every month, we will recognize the top improvers and share improvement stories.

Content

• We had GMs Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu and Hikaru Nakamura play games against the computer, but we picked an easy one for them: ChatGPT. So easy, we made the humans play blindfolded. How did it turn out? Probably how you expected.

• We also got several grandmasters together—including Carlsen, GM Fabiano Caruana, GM Anna Muzychuk, and others—to explain openings. Not to other grandmasters, of course—but in an ELI5 ("explain like I'm five years old") style. And who could have guessed, Magnus is great at this too:

• Don't miss our best articles this past month either, including WGM Dina Belenkaya's piece on chess analysis and NM Jeremy Kane on the role of luck—if any!—in chess.

Chessable

• If you're tired of the same old openings against 1.d4, good news: GM Jan Gustafsson is back on Chessable, along with CM Vjekoslav Nemec, with their new course Disrupt 1.d4: Austrian Defense for Black.
• Another popular Chessable author, GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko, is back with Crawl, Walk, Checkmate, a course aimed at building up your tactics fundamentals.

ChessKid 

Congrats Tani! pic.twitter.com/C5wuA1t7gl

— ChessKid.com 👑 (@ChessKidcom) July 21, 2025

• IM Tani Adewumi won the Biel Chess Festival Blitz Open! 
• ChessKid was in London for ChessFest on July 13—read all about it at ChessKid.
• The fifth edition of Kids vs. Stars ended with GM David Howell holding off our team of four prodigies by a 3-1 score. IM Marco Materia and FM Supratit Banerjee were still able to score draws off of Howell. 

Fair Play

Fair Play Stats for July

• 936,855 reports created
• 116,300 Fair Play closures (including 20 titled players: 1 IM, 8 FM, 2 WFM, 6 CM, 3 NM)
• 8,500+ mute actions
• 7,900+ accounts muted
• 225,000+ abuse closures
• 45,410,164 rating points refunded

Support

• Median Time to First Human Response: 24 hours
• Users Helped: 25,082
• Average Quality by Member Rating: 92.8%
• Total Ratings: 4,695

Thank you for being part of the world's largest chess community. Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

Missed any updates? Open the menu below for all past editions of the Community Update, or find last month's here.