Chess.com’s Gambit Poker Site Gains Momentum
The free learning-focused platform has nearly 75,000 members, and the company is already building companion sites for go, backgammon and mahjong.
Chess.com has launched Gambit as a free poker companion site built around learning rather than wagering. The company says the platform has no real-money gambling and no rake.
Chess.com said it chose poker for the first companion site because, like chess, it has learning and social elements in addition to play. Gambit borrows Chess.com’s design style and includes bot matches, games with friends, tournaments, a review mode and a learning mode.
The site also uses Chess.com bot characters, including Martin, plus an Elo-style rating system. The company says that rating system is meant to give players something to chase even without cash stakes, and it is the backbone of Gambit’s paid subscription for premium learning features. Cheng said Chess.com’s main business model is subscription, while most people play for free.
Chess.com said Gambit now has close to 75,000 members, nearly 20 million hands played and more than 100,000 beginner lessons completed together. In a separate company update, the beta had passed 12 million hands after three months, with more than 45,000 accounts and close to 200,000 hands played each day.
That same update said the Gambit Cup was already running every day at noon ET and had grown to over 400 players. Chess.com now says a special edition of the Gambit Cup will be broadcast live for the first time on Aug. 31 at 12 p.m. ET on Twitch and YouTube, with Danny Rensch and Alexandra Botez on commentary. The event will use a five-minute delay to help prevent stream sniping and will show hole cards, live win percentages, standings and chip counts.
In a Verge interview, chief growth officer Albert Cheng said AI helped get Gambit off the ground with just a two-person team. He said the biggest benefit was being able to read Chess.com’s existing codebase and design system and apply consistent patterns quickly, though AI was less helpful for brand and feature design. He also said the live version now has “zero or close to zero” AI-created assets after early prototypes used some.
Cheng also said Chess.com is building Elo-style rating systems for other classic games, including go, backgammon and mahjong. He said that work is moving “quite rapidly,” but did not give launch dates.
