3-Check Community Championship Knockout Will Have No GMs

Eight players have qualified for the 3-Check Chess Championship 2025 Knockout, the second event of this year's Community Chess Championships (following January's Puzzle Championship). The eight hopefuls for the Knockout ended up being FM Luuk Baselmans, FM Vasilios Kasioumis, CM Jesse Zafirakos, Aryan Rahimpour, FM Matfey Rogov, FM Teo Tomulic, IM Yoseph Taher, and FM Javier Benitez.

The Knockout, with its $2,500 prize fund and a first-place award of $750, begins on Friday, February 28, at 1 p.m. ET / 19:00 CET / 11:30 p.m. IST. It will be streamed on Chess.com's Community Twitch and YouTube pages, with FM James Canty and GM Jon Ludvig Hammer hosting.

Qualifier Winners and Knockout Bracket

• What Is 3-Check Chess?
• Grandmasters Miss Out On Knockout

What Is 3-Check Chess?

The rules of 3-check chess are fairly simple. Instead of checkmate, a player wins by delivering three checks to the opponent (although checkmate can also still win).

Despite the simplicity of the concept, this variant definitely requires a quite different strategy than regular chess. In standard chess, you don't want to open your king up too soon, but this becomes extremely important in 3-Check Chess, with even usually harmless opening moves turning into disasters. For instance, after 1.e4 d6 (normally a standard opening called the Pirc Defense), it's worthwhile for White to sacrifice a bishop for two checks after 2.Bb5+ c6 3.Bxc6+.

When you play 3-Check Chess on Chess.com, you can easily track how many checks you have both delivered and allowed.

You can read more about this variant in 3-Check Chess and the announcement of the 3-Check Community Championship.

Grandmasters Miss Out On Knockout

The Qualifiers themselves demonstrated just how different this variant is: no grandmasters and only one international master, Taher, will be playing Friday's Knockout. There will be four FIDE masters, however.

That was out of a combined participation of 5,750 (with many playing in multiple qualifiers, of course) for an average of 720 per tournament.

The closest qualifier was the sixth arena, with Tomulic winning by a single point over Benitez. Benitez lost his first game before ripping off a streak of 26 victories, but Tomulic's 27/30 score won out. Along the way, he defeated GMs Mitrabha Guha and Martyn Kravtsiv once each, needing just 20 moves against Mitrabha. There's no rule against resigning in 3-Check, and Tomulic was going to give his third check no matter what so Mitrabha moved onto his next game.

Ultimately, Benitez could not be too disappointed, as he qualified in the eighth and final event, scoring 30/32 to win comfortably. In a game against GM Benjamin Bok, Benitez showed how queen sacrifices that would be utter nonsense in standard chess turn into must-play tactics in 3-Check—although other elements, such as the sensitivity of the f2/f7 squares, do still apply.

Below is the full list of qualifiers, the participation level, winners, and the winning score.

With the highest title of anyone, Taher could be a favorite in the Knockout, but everyone is a threat. Even the untitled Rahimpour is a variants specialist who also qualified for November's Seirawan Chess Knockout.

Previous coverage of the 2025 Chess.com Community Championships:

• Puzzle Rush Royale: Naroditsky Comes Clutch In Final Rush, Qualifies With 7 Others
• It's Tactics Time! The Chess.com Puzzles Championship Starts On January 16
• Chess.com Community Championships 2025 Cycle Kicks Off January And Features 12 Events