You’d never die wondering what a site called Chess.com has to offer. The site claims over 275m members—including your forlorn, terribly-ranked correspondent—and is widely considered the internet’s most popular chess server. It’s where the world’s top players tend to play their online chess, and it’s where some of the game’s biggest stories have played out in recent years, for better or worse.
And now the site is… [checks notes] diversifying into online poker? If you’ve spent any time on Chess.com, then the branding and general feel of Gambit, Chess.com’s poker spin-off, will be instantly recognizable. The font is the same, the buttons are the same, and even the bots are the same—including Martin, Chess.com’s famously hopeless entry-level AI character, who’s presumably just begging for you to take his money as well as his queen.
Or, actually, no—because the thing with Gambit is that there’s no gambling to be done. The site is very clear about that fact from the outset—the literal first thing you see when you open the site is its tagline: “All of the poker. None of the gambling.”
Even so, poker seems like an unexpected direction for a chess site’s wing-spreading ambitions. Chess, like go and checkers, is a game of perfect information—everything that can be known about a given game is right there on the board in front of both players. Poker, by contrast, is pretty much the archetypal game of imperfect information—your opponent doesn’t know what cards you’re holding, and indeed, a great deal of the skill in poker comes from using that fact to your advantage.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a psychological component to chess—there absolutely is, as anyone who’s sweated over the board while the clock is ticking can attest. (And that’s assuming that both parties sit politely and wait for the other to move, which isn’t the case in, shall we say, more lively settings.) But no one’s trying to bluff that they still have a queen when they actually sacrificed it five moves ago.
Albert Cheng, Chess.com’s chief growth officer, told The Verge that despite the fundamental differences between chess and poker, the site chose the latter because it has “learning and social elements on top of just playing the game,” which, OK, although if anyone would like to point us to a multiplayer game that lacks these elements, we’re all ears. Curiously, Cheng also says that more obvious choices like go and backgammon are on the agenda for the site’s next project.
And finally, in a detail that… well, make of this what you will: as per The Verge’s piece, “[Cheng] and one other employee took Gambit from prototype to launch within a year, partly with help from AI, mainly for coding tasks.” That’s right, baby: the world’s biggest chess site vibe-coded this thing! Boo-yah! The Verge continues, writing, “without help from AI, getting another site up and running would have required a bigger team.” A bigger team! The humanity!
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that Gambit doesn’t require real money, because no one has any. But hey, at least we’ve got vibes, right? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pay the landlord in magic beans.