Chess.com Launches New Poker Site, Plans More Classic Game Sites with Player Ratings - Thanks to AI Protyping

In May Chess.com "quietly launched" a free educational poker site named Gambit, reports The Verge, where players can learn the game and improve an Elo-like rating without risking real money. And next Chess.com will expand into more classic games, including go, backgammon, and mahjong: Like Gambit, Chess.com is developing Elo-style rating systems for these games, as well. [Chess.com's chief growth officer, Albert Cheng] didn't say when the new sites will launch but that "development is moving quite rapidly" on them, using the same playbook he used for Gambit... He and one other employee took Gambit from prototype to launch within a year, partly with help from AI, mainly for coding tasks. "I think the biggest advantage that it's provided is essentially being able to read our existing codebase and our design system and apply consistent patterns to how we develop Chess.com over to a different platform and do so quickly," Cheng said.... "Just because code is easier to write doesn't mean that you just let it run on its own, but it certainly is a superpower in getting things off the ground."

Cheng also said the version of Gambit that's live at the time of writing has "zero or close to zero" AI-created assets, which were used in early prototypes.

According to Cheng, without help from AI, getting another site up and running would have required a bigger team or "would have been a lot more disruptive to the status quo of building and growing Chess." Now that a "small, scrappy" team can get a new platform off the ground much faster, it's opened the door for Chess.com to dip into more games, starting with poker.
The poker site already has 75,000 members, according to a blog post Friday — and they've already played nearly 20 million hands and completed 100,000 lessons. The site is now holding a daily poker tournament, and on Monday will broadcast the event with live commentary on their Twitch and YouTube channels.

Amateurtyping

[Arnonyrnous Covvard]

Protyping. Think diffarent.

chess.com is the worst

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

It's run like a Soviet dictatorship.

Re:chess.com is the worst

[fjo3]

It's run like a Soviet dictatorship.

Trump Chess is even worse. You can be White or Orange. When you're about to win, the AI bombs the board so you always lose.

Re:

[nomadic]

It's appropriate for a Chess.com story given their app now has ads by sketchy, low-class companies

Go ratings

[Opyros]

Hm. Go, of course, already has its own ranking systems [wikipedia.org], including a form of Elo.

A couple of weeks ago, chess.com was great

[wonkavader]

Now, all of a sudden there's this annoying guy with captions saying AI-like things each time you move on the puzzles. It's completely put me off the site. They added ads recently, and I thought "that's fair and makes sense." But the awful animated comment on every move? I'll either stop using the site, or put a post-it note over that part of the screen, which by the way will bock the ads.

They can now produce code faster. That does not mean they know what to produce.

Re:

[fjo3]

Now, all of a sudden there's this annoying guy with captions saying AI-like things each time you move on the puzzles. It's completely put me off the site. They added ads recently, and I thought "that's fair and makes sense." But the awful animated comment on every move? I'll either stop using the site, or put a post-it note over that part of the screen, which by the way will bock the ads.

They can now produce code faster. That does not mean they know what to produce.

lichess.com will be your new home.

I suspect

[NotEmmanuelGoldstein]

Poker and Mahjongg are gambling games, it's obvious where chess.com is headed. Old board games like Go, Backgammon and International Checkers (very different from US/UK checkers) already have a competition scoring system: chess.com will not be relevant. Chess.com can win with a tutorial service but its difficult to monetize that, which is why there is a shortage of tutorial services.

I find this kind of funny

[wwphx]

I used to help run grandmaster-level tournaments, and there was this one European GM who always went for an early draw. The reason? So he could bugger off to the local casino and play poker.

Apparently he was really good at it. He made a fee for playing at the chess tournament, and even more at the poker tables. I found it quite amusing. Makes me wonder if he's involved with the chess.com people. He never finished in the high prize money in the chess tournament, but he had fun and still got to play and talk chess with his fellow GMs. As long as he kept his ELO rating up high enough, he'd continue to get invited to tournaments and he'd continue to offer draws.