Chess.com Releases Leagues With $50,000 Contest

UPDATE: The Leagues contest is over. Check out the winners here.

Are you looking for yet another way to have fun playing on Chess.com!? Then today is your lucky day, because we are glad to announce a new feature: Leagues are live to all Chess.com members!

Earn trophies just by playing games the way you normally do anyway! Advance to the next league with no pressure, as you can never lose a level.

And possibly the best part? Get in early and you could win cash.

• Earn Trophies
• Get Promoted
• Win Prizes
• Conclusion

Earn Trophies

You already play a lot on Chess.com. The main way to track your progress has been your rating, but sometimes you need a different kind of motivation.

Now you can be rewarded for playing, regardless of your rating. You still have to win (or draw), but strength of opposition does not matter. Just keep playing the games you already play!

And how do you accumulate trophies to advance? By playing, and by playing well! All that matters is how many rated wins and draws you score against random challengers. Under this system, you don't have to worry about higher-rated players shutting you out from advancing, but you also can't lose every game to move up! Nor do you have to worry about someone challenging much lower-rated players to unrated games to spam points.

You can also gain trophies more quickly by scoring wins and draws in Arena tournaments which already run regularly on the site! Each point you score during an Arena is worth one extra trophy on top of the trophies earned during the tournament. (For example, if you score 12 Arena points and earn 17 trophies, you receive 29 trophies in total.)

We've also included a few rules that make the Leagues experience more exciting and fair for everyone. You won't receive trophies for games that last less than 10 moves or after your third win against the same opponent. You also won't get trophies for games played in non-standard time controls, like hyperbullet. Finally, you can earn trophies by drawing or winning Chess960 games, but other variants or simuls do not give you trophies.

Get Promoted

And what do these trophies get you? Well, each week you and 49 other players are grouped into a division, and at the end of the week, the top players in each division advance to the next one.

Everyone starts their first week in the Wood League. Can you make it all the way to Legend?

In the lowest division, the top 20 players out of 50 advance each week. As you move up, however, it gets harder, and by the end, only the winner of the Champion League joins the Legends!

Once you advance to a higher league, you can't fall back down. So if you must take a quick break (but we hope you don't!), you don't have to worry about losing progress.

Contest

Now for the real goodies: Plenty of premium memberships and lots of cold, hard cash. To celebrate the release of this amazing feature, Chess.com is giving away $50,000 and 200 diamond memberships. The first 200 players to reach the Champion League win a year-long diamond membership, but the contest doesn't end there.

Once our first Champion League gets underway, those 50 players will want to keep earning trophies, because continuing to do well there could be worth up to $10,000!

If multiple divisions of the Champion League opens up at the same time, players in that division can still win prizes, as follows: 

Update: The streamer contest outlined below has now concluded as of 1/16/2022. Thanks to those who participated!

Chess.com Partner Streamers have another $10,000 in prizes available. For the next four weeks, we'll be giving away $1,000 a week to the five partner streamers who collect the most trophies during the week.

The top trophy-earners, among Chess.com Partner Streamers, across the four weeks will also be entered into our $6K Multi-Club Arena Final, with $2,000 going to the winner.

Conclusion

There's no joining required as you will be automatically entered into Leagues by playing games. Get ready to start gunning for those prizes!