I'm the Head of Community for Chess.com. I earned the National Master title in 2012, and in 2014, I returned to my home state of South Carolina to start Strategery: Chess and Games. In late 2015, I began working for Chess.com and haven't looked back since.
You can find my personal content on Twitch , Twitter , and YouTube where I further indulge my love of chess.
The PRO Chess League featured thrilling play from established superstars, promising talents, and journeymen and women who put it all on the line for their team. In addition to team pride and prizes, these players were competing for $12,000 in indi...
And on the third day, no one rose again in Shamkir. Three rounds and fifteen games have resulted in a perfect fifteen draws. Each player in the event therefore has the distinction of being on both shared first and shared last place. The first pl...
GMs Sergey Grigoriants, Aram Hakobyan and IM Zhamsaran Tsydypov won the April 17 Titled Tuesday, the biggest ever, with 373 entrants and $5,000 in prizes. FM Santiago Zapata equaled their score of 8.5/10 but was disqualified for fai...
It is a rare and special thing to be able to defeat the world champion in classical chess. Players who do so belong to an elite group, termed the "Chigorin Club." For a player outside the world's top 50 to have such a chance is doubly rare. GM G...
A small windstorm touched down in Chess.com's digital offices as IM Daniel Rensch and fellow staff members breathed a massive sigh of relief this Tuesday. We are thrilled to say that the Titled Tuesday CrASH Test Tournament ran perfectly, with no ...
The Armenia Eagles, Ljubljana Turtles, Saint Louis Arch Bishops, and Chengdu Pandas won their divisions in the 2018 season of the PRO Chess League. These four teams are headed to San Francisco on April 7 and 8 for finals weekend where they wi...
Predicting results in the Professional Rapid Online (PRO) Chess League continues to be incredibly difficult. In the eight matches in round one of the PRO Chess League playoffs, three of the four divisional top seeds were upset by the fourth seeds....
The final round of the PRO Chess League regular season was a heartbreaker for many as several beloved teams either missed the playoffs or were relegated. Teams painfully falling short included Magnus Carlsen's Norway Gnomes, who held their fate in...
Like a black hole of drama, the world champion Magnus Carlsen's play has absorbed discussion and excitement each week. While Carlsen's results and play were likely frustrating to him this week, he dazzled the audience by playing a shocking swindle...
A PRO Chess League record 20,000 viewers were rooting on Magnus Carlsen as he raced toward a perfect score in the final rounds on Super Saturday. This made chess the sixth-most watched show on Twitch at the time! Some 220,000 unique viewers watche...
Justin Tan ("JannLeeCrazyhouse") claimed a solo and dramatic victory in Chess.com's 2018 Crazyhouse Championship on Thursday. Crazyhouse fans who haven't seen his epic streams (are there any?) will recall that he also shared victory (with FM ...
What do GMs Avital Boruchovsky, Yaroslav Zherebukh, Oleksandr Bortnyk, and Alexey Dreev have in common? They all scored 4/4 in round six of the PRO Chess League and led their teams to victory. Both Boruchovsky and Bortnyk, by virtue of the ...
There's no such thing as an easy PRO Chess League match. Yet again in round five, many top teams and top players were nicked for half- or full-point upsets, and the biggest winner of the week, the Amsterdam Mosquitoes, came completely out of lef...
What could make the PRO Chess League's Super Saturday and Sunday, a rapid event with five of the world's top ten players, even more exciting? World Champion Magnus Carlsen streaming his games! Carlsen decided to stream his play on longtime frien...
After three weeks of PRO Chess League play, there are two players (Magnus Carlsen on 8/8 and Fabiano Caruana on 4/4) and one team (Minnesota Blizzard) with a perfect score. Two players aside from Carlsen and Caruana achieved perfect scores this we...
For the second week in a row, only four PRO Chess League players managed a perfect 4/4 score. In an amazing turn of events, two of the four weren't even board ones! GMs Gawain Jones and Eduardo Iturrizaga scored for their team, but then second boa...
Had one speculated a year ago as to which elite player would be today's clear number-two by 20 (!) points, few (zero?) people would have picked Shakhriyar Mamedyarov. In the past year, Mamedyarov has collected more than 50 rating points with both ...
Magnus Carlsen (Norway Gnomes), Yu Yangyi (Chengdu Pandas), Le Quang Liem (Webster Windmills), and Luka Lenic (Ljubljana Turtles) managed the impressive feat of scoring 4/4 in round one of the PRO Chess League. Each helped their team to victory in...
Two Tata Steel veterans seized winning starts in the 80th edition of the tournament. Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand each won nice games with White—against Wei Yi and Maxim Matlakov respectively. Joining them in the lead is Anish Giri...
In a tight Titled Tuesday field, GMs Varuzhan Akobian and Francesco Rambaldi, both living in St. Louis, topped Chess.com's second Titled Tuesday in December. They each achieved the critical 8.5/10 score, a half-point ahead of three players in shar...
Chess.com apologizes to all of its fans and players for December 2017's Titled Train Wreck (Titled Dumpster Fire?). To sum up the technical difficulties, we first experienced a bug in which players that premoved their first move before the start...
"Magnus Carlsen dominates speed chess" is a fairly accurate description of chess in 2017. Carlsen has destroyed multiple fast chess formats. After shared firsts (but no title on tiebreak) in the World Rapid and Blitz Championships in December, he ...
It's always a wonderful surprise at Chess.com (and for all chess fans) when the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, gets the itch for online blitz. Yesterday, Titled Tuesday provided the perfect outlet. Also competing with the world champion? Hikaru N...
As commenter IM David Pruess observed, heartbreak was inevitable as 38 excellent PRO Chess League teams competed for only 8 berths in the 2018 season of the PRO Chess League. The ultimate qualifiers (the Armenia Eagles, Estonia Horses, Mumbai Mo...
