chess24 Developer Update

At chess24, we’re working constantly to bring you the best chess experience possible. New features are being released nearly every day, though some are easier to spot than others. With this new news series we want to take a moment to highlight them, giving you more insight into what’s happening here at our Hamburg office, directly from the developers.

The top 3 bullet players right now all have a FIDE title. Kudos to Paco for snatching first place!

For starters, we’ve recently added consistent FIDE titles across the whole site. This way, chess masters are easier to spot and identify, e.g. on our leaderboards or in the lobby. The chess titles are managed and assigned by the World Chess Federation (FIDE). Users with an official title on their profile have been validated and verified by our support team. Looking for an example? Visit the profiles of GM Jan Gustafsson, IM Lawrence Trent or GM Peter Svidler.

Getting annoyed by a certain user? Now you can put a stop to it. We’ve rolled out a site-wide blocking mechanism which allows you to block the pest throughout the whole of chess24. You won’t receive private messages from them, won't see messages they post to the site’s chat and won't be paired against them in the Playzone.

Did you spot the changes we’ve introduced to the icon that's displayed in your browser’s tab? It notifies you of events when it's in the background (e.g. notifications or new moves), so you never miss a thing.

If you've been enjoying using our Playzone you might have noticed we've optimized our pairing algorithm. The server is now much smarter and will come up with opponents closer to your rating. In addition, using our new rating selector*, you can now control how you get paired and against whom.

Our new selector allows fine-grained control over who you'll be paired against

Tournaments are one of the most anticipated features we’ve released recently for our Playzone. We’ve been working on this for quite some time now, actually, and have been taking great care to ensure the best experience possible. Playzone tournaments are currently in public beta and available to everybody. Behind the scenes we’re been making constant improvements e.g. last week we added new tiebreak algorithms. Want to accept the challenge? Head over to our Playzone tournaments overview and join a tournament today!

With all the events taking place in the chess world the action is sometimes a bit difficult to follow. That’s why we’re glad to have a great team of authors who provide us with news articles from around the globe. We’re very proud of our authors, which is why we've introduced full names for authors at the top of each article. In addition, we've started featuring some authors with a short profile just beneath articles.

WGM Anna Rudolf, as introduced beneath her detailed article on the World Youth U16 Chess Olympiad

Speaking of our written content, we’ve also added better sharing options to the whole site to help you spread the word.

Never miss out on the latest news with our iOS app

The mobile team is currently working hard on a new feature that’s going to be released at the beginning of this year: our video library on-the-go! Oh, and they’ve just released an update to our iOS app, introducing PGN synchronisation using iTunes Filesharing and a basic integration of our news. We're still looking for public beta testers for both platforms. Do you want access to features before we release them to the general public? Leave us a comment and we'll be in touch.

Of course, there’s always something going on behind the scenes that's not visible to the naked eye. For example, we cleaned up a huge part of our friendship system, added the current FEN in the Analysis tab below broadcast games, enabled Paypal for all our offers, introduced PGN downloads for all tournaments* and added a new page for handling infrastructure hiccups.

How are we doing? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear your opinion on the site in general and the new features in particular. Thanks in advance and have fun!

* As of right now these features are only available to Premium users. Not a Premium member yet? Subscribe now and enjoy all the benefits.