Chess.com's Realtime Chess Network Now Hosting 94% Of Games, Delivering Faster Speeds Worldwide

We're excited to announce that Chess.com is now hosting the vast majority of games on our platform on the Realtime Chess Network, the only globally distributed chess server, which we've been developing over the last four years. This means many players who have previously experienced slower connections should see a great improvement in stability and speed—in extreme cases, even seeing 10 times faster responses from our server!

The Realtime Chess Network is part of Chess.com's ongoing effort to deliver the best online chess-playing experience to everyone, regardless of where they live. After four years of development, we're happy to announce that we now have four servers in place spread across the globe (with more to come!), along with a brand new infrastructure to support them.

These servers will considerably reduce latency, which is the time it takes for information to travel from your device to our servers, especially for members who live outside the Americas. In practice, you'll notice that Chess.com will respond faster to your actions.

"Our long-term goal is for every chess player on the planet to have a fast and stable connection to Chess.com, whether they are playing from Bangkok, Bangladesh, Alaska, or Argentina," said Chess.com's CEO, Erik Allebest. "With the ongoing rollout of the Realtime Chess Network, we've already made huge strides toward this goal."

Our long-term goal is for every chess player on the planet to have a fast stable connection to Chess.com, whether they are playing from Bangkok, Bangladesh, Alaska, or Argentina.
— Erik Allebest, Chess.com's CEO

The Origins Of Lag

When playing on Chess.com, your device is not connected directly to our website. Instead, when you make a move, your device sends that information through a series of networks until it lands on our website. Between your device and our servers, there can be many touchpoints like your router, your local ISP, regional ISPs, and so on. Note that Chess.com only controls and can optimize the play server and its location.

Once that information hits our server, it goes through another series of networks until it gets to your opponent's device. When they make a move in response, the same process repeats, but from their device to our server and from our server to your device.

One of the things that affects latency is the distance between the devices from both players and our server. This happens mostly because the number of networks between the devices and the server increases drastically with larger distances.

How Will The New Servers Improve Your Playing Experience?

By adding new servers in different parts of the world, we have optimized the information route between your device, our servers, and your opponent's device.

Two European members, for instance, will connect to our server in the Netherlands when playing against each other. The same applies to members living in Asia, who might now connect to our Indian server. If a European player gets matched against an Asian player, they might connect to either of the two servers, depending on where they live.

Ultimately, matchmaking will remain the same and will not consider players’ locations. However, once you’re matched with someone else, we’ll select the best option between our four servers to host the game with the lowest latency possible. 

Where Will You Feel The Difference?

Every day, Chess.com handles around 20 million live games. As of today, our new network hosts 94% of them. The Realtime Chess Network is active for most rated and unrated standard games.

Currently, direct challenges, arenas, Swiss tournaments, variants, and old mobile apps are not supported by the new servers. However, a big part of our efforts over the last four years was to build the necessary infrastructure to expand the network to other parts of the website. With that infrastructure now mostly in place, we'll be able to build up and eventually migrate all our games to the Realtime Chess Network, bringing a smoother playing experience to everybody.

We hope you are as excited as we are about this update! Please share your thoughts and feedback below!