Chess.comReviews 216

Website is slow as hell, and playing on any device besides a PC on your home network is impossible. The mobile app is clunky and impossible to use, you often lose seconds of time due to the app lagging on a perfectly fine network, which in Bullet pretty much secures the victory for your opponent who is often playing on a PC anyways. Yes, playing on mobile does not prevent you from going against PC players who are able to premove many more moves ahead, have far greater agility with their large monitors and mice, etc.

My criticisms of this website do not end here, besides Chess.com's atrocious website and app networking, any feature beyond playing chess on it is blocked behind a paywall. Want to analyze your game? You can do so once a day without paying at least $5 a month, a plan that would still only grant you a limited number of features. Want to select the "Lessons" they keep shoving down your throat through various popups on their website? Same story. Want to get rid of ads? Again, pay or simply use an Adblock at least something Chess.com can't lock behind a paywall. Anything that legitimately sets Chess.com apart from your typical "Free Chess" app on the AppStore is locked behind a monthly paywall. Pay us or stay bad at chess due to distracting ads, an inability to analyze your games and terrible servers. Typical.

However, if you think you will actually be able to play using Chess.com's horrendous servers, you are also gravely mistaken. Just recently, they claimed to have "very high demand" and claim to be working on scaling their services. For an indefinite time, unless you pay for their "Diamond" membership which comes out to a whopping $12.50 if you pay per month for a full year, or otherwise *$20.99* per month, you will randomly be unable to play chess. Wonderful.

As an 1800 rated bullet player, and a 1600 rapid player, the lack of features offered for free, terrible service and overall atrocious website and app build quality makes for an abysmal experience. If you don't already depend on Chess.com, do not use it. Lichess is thousands of times better and all its features are offered for free.

Platform crashes all the time making you to lose games on time!NOT good at all! It appears that its from their server but still you have a loss on time.

They take your premium money and do not invest in their operation in order to handle the traffic they have. Millions of new "subscribers" (free) account to a DNS attack and most of them are "gamers" and not chess players, using engines to cheat for the "score." So, a paying member cannot access the site, period, nor the premium features they paid for, then they are cheated by the millions of DNS free members who can just create a new profile and come back and cheat again. Chess.com will not deal with obvious cheaters because that would be admitting to a problem that they would have to deal with, and they don't want to deal with it. They want to take your premium money and give you nothing in return but free member cheaters. SUGGESTION: Premium players should be on their own server(s) and have the ability to only play against other premium players who care to support the site. Let the freeloaders suffer 503/DNS errors and let the paying players enjoy the fruits of their contributions to your site.

Hey want nothing but money if you are premium member and you use bad language chess.com will not block you

You create a login. Play, win and suddenly your account is closed for no reason at all.
Biased for Asian users it keeps on doing it from time to time.
I usually pick "beginner" to start with and win good 20-30 matches in a row. But as soon as I reach 1600+ the account gets banned for no reason at all.

The servers hang, no support staff, no replies to emails, nothing.

Hello Sitejabber,

I recently discovered this webpage and to be honest I believe it is a scam. I seemingly can not win! The game cheats and uses sneaky tactics to predict your move. It is impossible and I hate seeing young gamers and epic pranksters getting ripped off.

DO NOT PLAY!

I am very passionate about this game. It's chess, I find it disgusting they have however many people on payroll and make you pay for memberships to turn around and not have any customer support number. They have a monopoly on chess and charge for memberships and employ people but don't have a way to contact them. I find it disheartening to know chess is in the hands of such a scummy and greedy corporation. I don't have my password so it won't let me pay money for the membership. Laughable. I just want to have access to the tools they posses to help me improve. Thats it, I'm willing to pay for it but there is no support so there's no way for me to rectify the situation. Ridiculous. Scummy corporation that has a monopoly on the game and dosen't have the best intentions for the game at heart. The entire staff should be fired and sued. This is not the direction chess should be headed towards. Scummy, scummy capitalists in charge of this trash website. I love the game but just like the goverment, I love the game but hate the gatekeepers. Trash staff. The CEO should be shot.

I loved using this app, learning how to play chess, and playing against people online. It was quite literally all fun and games until I took a long break from it. I got somewhat better at the game offline, came back quite literally today, played two rounds before eating dinner, came back to check my email and my mf account was closed for "suspicious activity." Is getting good without your stupid app a violation of their terms, well then I'll do it $#*!ing again $#*!s!

Subscription isn't worth it at all, very bad customer service, there is better sites. They ban you for talking with your opponent.

Chess.com operates an apparent scam to get players to sign-up (pay) for its diamond service etc. It plays you against bots disguised as people. I know because I tried holding two different accounts - my ratings were significantly different! How is that explained?

Chess.com is a good website, it has a good UI, fantastic bots, amazing people, and a better rating system than lichess, but I don't feel like it's good. I have poor wi-fi, and chess.com isn't making it better. Chess.com should have an option for people with slow connections. My primary time controls are 3 min. Blitz, and 1 min. Bullet, but chess.com isn't helping me get better, or like chess more, but it's just kinda bad. Chess.com might make me feel worse at chess. The lessons are amazing, but they restrict it better. I hate lichess puzzle lessons, but at least they give me more than one lesson per day, and that's the least chess.com could do. This is all I want to add to chess.com's website, SLOW CONNECTIONS for people with slow connections. Why is it that I lost just because the internet at my school is horrible? It's not my fault that the internet is trash and people are greedy. At least give a draw or at least a chance to pause the game and carry on until the other person is back online. Could they just stop the game, let the other person play other games, then notify the other person that I'm online? Then I just wait to resume the game. Is it that hard to do? Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my rant about the internet, but chess.com is really starting to go behind lichess in terms of how much I like it, and I despise lichess.

On chess.com I like to use the review feature to analyze my games and see my mistakes I ran out of free reviews for the day and was given the option to upgrade in order to unlock the feature. When I pressed upgrade I was shown only yearly plans and purchase a year of subscription thinking I was buying a month. Not only that you can't use the review unless you get the more expensive plan. Shady practices to say the least

Most players in 1600-1900 range are blatantly cheating, they catch like 10% of cheaters or less after many weeks, this is only a scheme to bait paid subscribers and to do the bare minimum to keep the money coming in rather than to actually make a good playing environment for legitimate players. They actively delete forum discussions who criticize them. They should not be allowed to own the domain. My real rating is 2050 but can barely reach 1700 here because of all the cheaters. Avoid at all cost and never pay money. I would give it 0 stars if I could. Good review scores are given by site administrators or paid.

They put against their robots so you won win any games and so they offer you a membership so you can improve your tactics lol. Disgrace for real chess players.

Chess.com claims a draw each and every time it is being beaten badly. As a player, (a) why am I not given the same option, and (b) why aren't we challengers given an opportunity to play beyond Chess.com's claimed: "draw". I have moved to play online elsewhere until these flaws are fixed.

I hve bad experience played with many cheaters at this site. They know a spcific key that makes the game ended as they won while the game still running. I faced this situation many times and I reported all of it but no one come to me and also I am loosing my points and time playing with cheaters
I am very disappointed and will not play here anymore if I did not get back the points I lost with these cheaters. Attached photos for my last 2 games
YOU ARE LOOSING YOUR CHRIDABILITY

Long-time user, first-time reviewer.

The new UI(s) have taken things down several pegs. The features have been removed, and the usability is gone.

What's the point?