Chief Chess Officer IM Danny Rensch hosted this year’s first State of Chess on Tuesday. Joined by three special guests during the four-hour broadcast, Danny discussed a wide array of topics, from the Queen of Chess documentary, to trust and safety on the website, to the present and future of AI, and more.
You can watch the full broadcast and keep reading for the highlights.
Here’s what was discussed during the show:
Conversation With Queen of Chess Director Rory Kennedy
Chess.com Updates
Trust And Safety With David Watkis
The Present And Future Of AI In Chess With Vinay Bhat
Ask Danny Anything
Conversation With “Queen of Chess” Director Rory Kennedy
The first segment introduced Rory Kennedy, the award-winning director of Netflix’s new hit documentary Queen of Chess. The film, about the life and career of GM Judit Polgar, has reached Netflix’s top-10 charts worldwide and the number-one spot in many countries.
Kennedy said that the hope, in creating the film, was “that it would reach not only chess fanatics but also the wider community.” She’s received many emails and feedback from people who have gotten interested in chess since watching the movie.
Kennedy herself isn’t a chess player, and when she was approached by a fellow film-maker to create the film, her first question was, “Who is Judit Polgar?” As she started reading about Polgar’s background and going deeper, she said, “My feeling was, why don’t I know Judit Polgar’s name?” She hoped to create the sense of excitement she felt as she learned about Polgar’s story:
Coming out of that environment, I think Judit kind of blew everybody’s minds in terms of her capacity and her prowess, and it’s a really fun story to get out in the world… it became very exciting to me, and I wanted to reflect that in the film. And I’m so happy that so many people have come up to me and said, you know, I was at the edge of my seat watching this film.
GM Garry Kasparov is a central figure in the film, and Kennedy explained, “Ultimately, she (Polgar) wanted to take on Garry Kasparov, you know, he was the best of the best… she was really focused on him and trying to beat him… we ultimately narratively focused the film on that story,” saying that the rivalry gave the film a “structural orientation” that viewers could grasp onto.
Kennedy also mentioned the striking musical compositions ranged from classical music to female punk bands. “It feels unnatural, but it somehow works beautifully”—the idea being that these female chess players came into a predominantly male chess world and were “blowing it up.”
An example of the environment the Polgars were “blowing up.”
User Ilove_Linkinpark asked the closing question: What should Chess.com and the chess world do to make women in chess more represented? Kennedy answered:
I think showcasing women and making sure that they have a platform, that they are focused on, that there’s a spotlight on them, that young girls can see older women as role models that they can aspire to… recognizing and showcasing them and making sure that young women but also young boys are seeing them on equal footing and equal ground makes all the difference.
… making sure that young women but also young boys are seeing them on equal footing and equal ground makes all the difference.
—Rory Kennedy
Chess.com Updates
Next, Danny discussed several updates at Chess.com. Topics included the number of games and users on the website, event updates, product updates, the latest on Chessable.com, as well as Proctor and Fair Play in titled prize events. Here are some numbers to start:
250 million registered users on Chess.com. If Chess.com were a country, it would be the fifth most populated country on earth, right behind Indonesia
23,035,551 games were played just on February 17, 2026 alone. This does not include bot games—only games between two human players
Chess.com uptime is at its best – 99.95% in January 2026 and 99.92 in February 2026
Also, in case you haven’t heard yet, Netflix’s Untold: Chess Mates episode about the GM Magnus Carlsen and GM Hans Niemann controversy following the 2022 Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis is coming out on April 7. You can watch the trailer, with reactions by Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest and Danny, below.
Events Updates
Carlsen won the 2025 Speed Chess Championship Finals in London. The event sold out and featured double the audience from the last edition in Paris 2024
The Chess.com Open, previously known as the Chess.com Global Championship, just started last week with qualifiers. It will determine up to three players who will advance to the 2026 Esports World Cup
GMs Carlsen, Alireza Firouzja, and Denis Lazavik have already qualified for the Esports World Cup via the Champions Chess Tour leaderboard. Many others are in contention.
Product Updates
Streaks are officially back. User Merlin-Pendragon has the longest streak on our website, at 5750 days (or nearly 16 years!)
Chess.com launched an ad-free plan, just $11.99/year or $1 per month
You can now sync your contacts to find your friends on Chess.com
New mobile widget that will always remind you of your streak and make it easier to play
New Learn-to-Play experience, already tried by 1.5 million members
New Puzzles interface and a rating revamp (improved Elo accuracy)
Chessable Updates
Popular new courses: GM Sam Shankland‘s 1.e4 Lifetime Repertoire, GM Aman Hambleton‘s London System, and GM Peter Svidler‘s presentation of The Complete Manual of Positional Chess
New opening repertoire feature on Chessable “turns you from active learner to architect of your chess growth”
Fair Play
Proctor has significantly reduced cheating
Danny addressed frustrations expressed by publicly by GMs Fabiano Caruana and Raunak Sadhwani about receiving zero-point byes during the Chess.com Open. You can read all the details in our post, but moving forward: disconnected players in titled player prize events will now be paired into the next round
Overall, a very small number of players received zero-point byes due to disconnection or leaving the tournament (e.g. simply closing the browser)
Trust And Safety With David Watkis
In the following segment, Danny had a conversation with Senior Product Manager of Trust and Safety David Watkis about our new protections, settings, and initiatives to keep Chess.com safe.
David, who previously worked for the software company Automattic for about 11 years, connects many different departments to create a safe environment at Chess.com. He said, “Our goal is to make chess as appealing and accessible and fun and fair as possible for everybody.”
Our goal is to make chess as appealing and accessible and fun and fair as possible for everybody.
—David Watkis
His day-to-day work brings together various teams, “trying to be the connective tissue to bring this all together, to centralize efforts, make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.”
Fairness is an important part of moderation on Chess.com, as David explained, “We want to try to come down on that side of being fair rather than over reach or being too aggressive with certain automated systems.” For example, context matters; two friends teasing each other can look like abuse, but if they’re both in on the inside joke, it isn’t really.
AI and machine learning (which we’ll learn more about in the next segment) are part of the process. “We have a machine learning model that’s analyzing every username that’s being created on Chess.com.” Rather than being “reactive”—that is, catching problems only after they happen—David said, “that’s all happening on the frontend, proactively.”
Over 1,000 offensive usernames per day are being detected.
Game chat on Chess.com is “one of the primary vectors of abuse,” said David. Similar to usernames, the team is working toward being proactive and not reactive here too.
On the sportsmanship side, we are notifying players of our community standards to increase positive experiences, not just preventing and moderating negative experiences after they happen. One improvement made recently is that players can now toggle their chat settings to receive chats by request only or from friends only. Users have that proactive choice.
His advice for users who write reports on the website was: “Be as specific as possible with the details that you’re bringing up… the more specifics we have, the better we can dig into those things.”
The Present And Future Of AI In Chess With Vinay Bhat
The last guest on the show was the one and only GM Vinay Bhat, Chess.com’s new Director of AI/ML Engineering. Vinay was a former chess prodigy who smashed Bobby Fischer’s record at age 10 to become the youngest-ever U.S. national master. After focusing on his career, he has recently come back to the chess world.
Vinay recalled meeting Danny as far back as 1999. Chess.com dug up this photograph from the 2008 Berkeley International, which is actually where Danny met Chess.com co-founders Erik Allebest and Jay Severson (this encounter is featured in Danny’s book, Dark Squares). Erik took this photo of Jay, who wanted a picture in front of Vinay—Danny just happened to be there.
That’s GM Irina Krush in the back, wearing a hat, by the way, and GM Jesse Kraai in the front, also wearing a hat.
Vinay, who was formerly Head of Data Science at Shipt and a key engineer at Warner Music Group, explained that he stumbled into this job after reading an article about Danny’s book in The Guardian. He happened to check chess.com/jobs after reading and found the opening for his current position. He said, “I am not sure how the timing would have worked out if I hadn’t seen that article.”
So what does he do? Vinay partners with David, who spoke in the previous segment, to use AI to help detect offensive usernames and process abuse reports on the platform. He is also involved in working on coaching features, especially bots that can be aware of how you improve over time and how you can train to become better. A third area he’s focused on is developing more humanlike bots, ones that are “playing and predicting moves in a much more human-like manner.”
He also spoke about the long-term goal for Coach:
The end vision is a coach that can follow you around on the platform. It knows what you’ve been doing, what are some of your strengths, weaknesses, patterns. It knows how to encourage you, sort of lean into positive reinforcement and some of the behaviors, habits.
Like Danny, Vinay was a prodigy who published his own book—in 2023.
Lastly, Danny asked Vinay what he sees in the future of AI and chess. Vinay explained that he’d like AI to be used as a tool and said this is already how professionals have been using it for some time now:
Top players, they leverage the engine and AI to kind of expand their horizon as opposed to shrinking the space that humans can actually play in. So my hope is that is actually that AI is more of a tool… and continues to open up the game to more folks.
My hope is that is actually that AI is more of a tool… and continues to open up the game to more folks.
—Vinay Bhat
Ask Danny Anything
As always, Danny answered questions live in the last segment of the show. There were too many questions to get to all of them, but he covered a bunch! You can read through those here.
What is Chess.com doing for the Candidates?
We will have a broadcast on Twitch and YouTube, news coverage, and on-site presence, as usual! You can read more about how to follow the Candidates by reading our article. Danny will be rooting for Nakamura and Caruana, but also provided a hot take: “Don’t be surprised if Wei Yi wins the Candidates!”
“Don’t be surprised if Wei Yi wins the Candidates,” says @DanielRensch pic.twitter.com/dLlwb31TlA
— chess24 (@chess24com) March 24, 2026
@MaxMurrayx: Is lagging and technical issues with your proctor software causing titled players to lose games on time?
This was answered earlier in the show. Danny added, “Much of what has been claimed as a proctor issue is actually not… The truth is that often people’s connection is more local or device-oriented than they would want to say, and we addressed a couple specific cases earlier today.”
DavideNastasio: A lot of players complain about proctor but it seems is working well to detect titled cheaters. Are there future improvements?
“Yes, it needs to continue getting better and better.” Danny spoke about how we’re going to continue updating Proctor, just as web browsers like Chrome or Firefox do. And, “We have to make sure we’re going to have to continue to make sure that Proctor is freaking bada**, and we have to continue to work hard, and shout out to the team that’s doing that.”
U/Pierrelucracine: I want a feature that automatically archives games that contains a brilliant moves that I made.
“Did you know that this already exists? Go to Chess.com/stats.”
U/Embarrassed_base_389: Why is there no opening database from Chess.com games? That feature alone makes me want to analyze games on lichess.
We are developing this and it’s in beta right now. “We are at 32 billion chess games that have been played on Chess.com… and it is about to be rolled out past beta very soon.” By the way, a fun fact is that more than 1.6 million games have started with the Scholar’s Mate.
U/Wonderwind271: An important chess etiquette is that if you offer a draw and opponent declines, you should not offer another draw … any ideas on enforcing this rule in Chess.com?
“This is on web only, but I think on web there’s an option to decline all future draws. If that doesn’t exist on mobile, it should. So I’m just going to say I agree with you.” Danny also added,
If I’m thinking it through in real time, I would say that an immediate second draw offer should just get a message that says, ‘Hey, you really shouldn’t do that,’ a third one should get a warning, and a fourth one I would say the person should just lose their right to offer a draw and it should probably trigger some sort of behavior that marks them as an abuser.
U/Tatsumakironyk: Brenan Klain hinted earlier this year that the technology behidn the bots on Chess.com is due to be updated … to make them play closer to their displayed ratings, and more humanlike (Any updates?)
“We just discussed this earlier with Vinay.”
U/Mmusic91: Hey Danny! Are there plans to bring access to collections over to the Chess.com app? If so, when?
“Eventually, but… there are lot of things we want to do for those happy members of our community to make them more happy, but adding collections to mobile is not immediately on the roadmap. The reality is that we already get a lot of feedback from the majority of our users that our app has a lot going on, and we have to really think through how to make sure all the features are there without suffering from app bloat, as they say in our world.”
Mantasmodas: Will we ever have a feature to have a shared analysis board between 2 or more people?
“You can actually do this, you can have more than one person in a classroom, but the experience can and should be better and we’re working on it.”
“I think it used to work better to immediately be able to invite someone post-game, quickly get an analysis session. I personally think our classroom tool and how it connects to the play server leaves a lot of room to be improved. I don’t feel like it’s a great experience right now, for coaches and for students, and that’s the truth, and we need to be better in that area.”
U/Dorianturk: Hiya Danny – are there any plans to expand puzzles to better track and target specific tactics/study ideas?
“Yes, Vinay talked about that… “
Toastbread_1: When will bughouse get moved to the variants server?
“I’m a huge believer in bughouse… I love bughouse, I call it doubles chess… I think this is actually like a really exciting format… but there’s a lot of other things we’re working on, so it hasn’t been as top of mind… but it is something we will continue to improve.”
Mantasmodas: When will we be able to have conditional pre-moves?
“It’s already on web and android… and it will be on IOs at some point later this year.”
Bub: Why is ur book called Dark Squares?
“My editor recommended it!… at one point the actual title being considered for it was Searching for Danny Rensch… that is the grossest thing in the world.”
“I had a pretty dark journey to get to Chess.com… it was the first time that I opened up to the world about my life. The idea was that dark squares leaned into what you don’t see.”
Will you focus on education, entertainment, or general site feature improvements in the near future?
“Yes, everything. You should check out our new years resolution blog.”
Satyalt3: Danny, will Chess.com set up country vs country team matches for regular players (not just titled)?
“It already exists in the World League.”
U/Overall_concept_1428: Danny, will we ever see any Daniel Naroditsky Memorial?
Yes, it is actually happening in Charlotte in July. You can read more about the rapid and blitz event, and GM Hikaru Nakamura and many others have already committed to participating. Danny added, “It is not our event, but Chess.com is a partner and we are supporting it.”
Previous coverage:
State Of Chess Returns March 24 With Rory Kennedy, Trust & Safety Update, AI Discussion
