The biggest chess site in the world is struggling with the sudden spike of interest in the royal game, as its scrambling to upgrade its server capacities to deal with the number of queries. This forced chess.com to temporarily limit the number of potential live games at peak times, carving out an exception for paying customers—and not everyone is happy.
Online chess is more popular than ever, with the player numbers surpassing those we’ve seen during the pandemic and the Netflix-induced boom after the Queen’s Gambit was released.
The increased demand has been a challenge to handle for chess.com, with live games constantly getting abandoned due to server issues over the past couple of weeks. As a temporary solution, the company decided to limit the number of live games at peak times.
There’s a way to get around this limitation, but like everything else in life, it comes at a cost. As per the follow-up tweet, “premium accounts, including titled player accounts, are not affected by the limit.” Non-paying customers can still play against bots or solve puzzles until they hit their free quota—or move over to Lichess for a while.
As expected, Redditors had a field day with the announcement, offering alternative solutions like “just become a titled player.”
That said, the disruption should not last long. “We will have significant hardware upgrades in place early next week and hope to achieve full stability and accommodate the increased traffic soon,” the announcement concluded.
