The Latest News in the World of Chess

5 min readFeb 5, 2022

If you spend time on our Telegram channel, you’ll see we have a community full of chess enthusiasts. We’re all about taking the game into the future, into the metaverse!

Naturally, we love to discuss what’s going on in the world of chess, and how MetaChess fits into all of it. So occasionally, we’ll write a blog post covering what’s going on in the chess space.

Here’s what’s been happening recently.

1. Carlsen & Karjakin Play to a Draw (with some trolling involved)

In late January, there was a match between Magnus Carlsen, who is a Norwegian chess grandmaster and the reigning five-time World Chess Champion, and Sergey Karjakin. Karjakin is a Russian chess grandmaster and a chess prodigy who previously held the record as being the world’s youngest-ever grandmaster.

The match took place at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament (aka “chess Wimbledon”).

The two world-class chess masters played to a draw, a short draw to be exact. This type of draw is very well-known but not well-liked (to say the least). There are indications that the draw might’ve been intentional on the part of Karjakin. There was also a bit of trolling in this tweet by Karjakin which included a hashtag #saynoto2900. 2900 refers to the Elo rating that Carlsen was gunning for.

Nevertheless, Carlsen won the tournament.

2. Community Chess Spaces Are Alive and Well

One of the most popular places for public chess playing in the world is Washington Square Park in New York City. And now, Berkeley has Telegraph Avenue — a renewed home for public chess. Thanks to the efforts of Jesse Sheehan (who’s originally from Queens, New York), public chess in Berkeley has seen a revival.

“Everyone plays — college students, working folks … we do our best to keep it peaceful and make sure no one is being disturbed,” Sheehan said, describing it as a vehicle for social uplift. “It’s a godsend for people who need a place to be safe, outside, coming out of the pandemic.”

Similar to this, MetaChess is also organizing offline tournaments. These offline tournaments will not only build up local chess communities, but also strengthen the MetaChess community and our project. Having already organized a successful offline tournament in Nigeria, MetaChess is making sure that more is to come.

These offline chess events will help to:

Bring our community closer together
Provide new earning opportunities to members
Offer fun and entertainment
Power business and personal connections.

3. FIDE Grand Prix Starts

The FIDE Grand Prix started on February 4th. The first leg in Berlin won’t include the top seed, GM Ding Liren. The Chinese player failed to obtain a visa in time to travel to Germany and has been replaced by GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek. GM Dmitry Andreikin can’t play either and has been replaced by GM Andrey Esipenko.

Note: The FIDE Grand Prix is a biennial series of chess tournaments, organized by FIDE (“Fédération Internationale des Échecs” — French for “International Chess Federation”) and its commercial partner Agon.

Ding will make it to the second leg of the tournament, but he won’t have a chance of winning the tournament since he’s coming in late. This could be a serious blow to his career. Ding currently ranks at 2799, according to the Elo rating system.

For more info on the tournament, check out the article from Chess.com.

4. Chess Is Becoming a Top Esport

The world of esports is not that prominent in the legacy media. But on the Internet, it’s all the rage. However, when someone says esports, many think of video games.

Not so fast.

Chess has quickly arrived on the esports scene — and could become one of the industry’s most popular games.

Chess matches are attracting increasingly larger audiences.

Recently, Michael Brancato, who was formerly on Twitch, has joined Chess.com as its Vice President of Esports. Under Brancato’s leadership, chess should be able to build up its livestream audiences even more.

Prior to joining the online chess platform, Brancato spent over five years at Twitch, where he held roles such as Senior Esports Product Manager and League Operations Lead. Under the alias Nintendude, Brancato was also a former competitive Super Smash Bros player.

Chess’ esports popularity is already impressive. The 2021 FIDE World Championship in Dubai reached a massive peak of 613,000 concurrent viewers. By comparison, the previous World Chess Championship in 2018 had a peak of 260,000 viewers. That’s a 2.4x increase in audience.

As chess becomes more popular in esports, projects taking chess into the future, like MetaChess, should attract the attention of more players and fans. We’re confident that MetaChess will help chess bring a new generation of players into the game.

5. Chess Is Coming to the Metaverse

As the metaverse develops and matures, the possibilities for MetaChess will expand.

Aside from offline tournaments, we plan on integrating the tournament feature into our platform, which will allow us to organize online tournaments. We will also introduce new levels into our PVE game modes.

However, what we’re most excited about is the launch of the Warfront beta version in March. This is the name of the 3D version of MetaChess that has human characters and displays different battle modes. Warfront is the fully realized metaverse chess vision.

Stay tuned — because the chess metaverse will be live soon.

About MetaChess:

MetaChess is the first 3D multiplayer play-to-earn (P2E) and NFT metaverse chess game. The platform is in 2D and 3D. The 3D version will be divided into two. The first part is the regular chess game, with traditional chess pieces in 3D. The second part is more animated and fancy. It consists of chess pieces in the form of humanoid characters. You can own NFTs (unique chess pieces) which will be used in the game. The platform also has play-to-earn (P2E) models that make it worth players’ time. The 2D version is currently playable. You can either play with AI or play with another user.