Chess.com launches free poker site Gambit, with go, backgammon and mahjong next

Chess.com opens a second front with Gambit

Chess.com has spent close to two decades doing exactly one thing. That changed in May, when the company quietly put its first companion site into beta: Gambit, a free online poker platform where no real money is ever at stake. According to The Verge, the site is now stepping into the open with its first livestreamed tournament and creator collaborations — and Chess.com is already preparing to repeat the trick with other classic games.

A poker site that looks a lot like Chess.com

Anyone who has spent time on Chess.com will find Gambit's layout familiar. As The Verge notes, the new site reuses Chess.com's visual style and much of its feature set: bot opponents, private games with friends, tournaments, a review mode for studying past hands, and interactive lessons. Even the bot characters carried over — Martin, Chess.com's lowest-rated bot, sits at the bottom of Gambit's difficulty ladder too.

The pitch is explicitly educational and social rather than financial. Chess.com chief growth officer Albert Cheng told The Verge that poker appealed for the same reasons chess does: it combines learning and community with the game itself. He was blunt that real-money play is off the table permanently, saying: "Real money is the problem we built Gambit to get away from, the whole industry makes money when beginners lose. We'd rather build a place where people can actually learn."

Ratings do the work that money does elsewhere

Without stakes, Gambit needs another reason for players to care. Cheng's answer is a custom Elo-style rating system for poker, which he described to The Verge as the counterweight that keeps the games reasonably high-quality — something players value in place of a bankroll.

The rating system also anchors monetization. Gambit follows the Chess.com playbook: core play stays free, while a paid subscription unlocks premium learning features such as in-depth reviews. Cheng pointed out that most people play Chess.com for free and subscribe for extras like unlimited puzzles and lessons, and Gambit is structured the same way. A rating players trust gives them a measurable sense of progress, which is what nudges them toward paying.

Go, backgammon and mahjong are next

Gambit appears to be a template rather than a one-off. Cheng told The Verge that Chess.com is also developing Elo-style rating systems for go, backgammon and mahjong, applying the same approach that produced Gambit. He declined to give launch dates but said development on the new titles is moving quickly, and that the company is targeting games that combine classic durability with an existing community, as chess does.

How AI made the expansion possible

The most striking detail is how small the team was. Cheng and a single colleague took Gambit from prototype to launch in under a year, and he credits AI with much of the speed, particularly for coding tasks. According to The Verge, the biggest benefit was AI's ability to read Chess.com's existing codebase and design system and apply those patterns consistently to a new platform. Cheng was careful to note the limits — AI struggled with brand and feature design — and said the live version of Gambit contains "zero or close to zero" AI-generated assets, which appeared only in early prototypes. He framed the outcome as a blend: code that is easier to write still needs human judgment, but a small, scrappy team can now stand up a new platform where it previously would have required hiring more people or pulling focus from the core chess business.

Why it matters

Two things make this more than a side project. First, it is a live test of whether Chess.com's formula — free play, bots, lessons, ratings and subscriptions — transfers beyond chess, and a signal that the company intends to become a broader classic-games platform rather than a single-game site. Second, it is a concrete example of AI shrinking the cost of expansion: a product that once demanded a larger team or a distraction from the main business was built by two people in a year. Gambit's first streamed event, the Gambit Cup, airs August 31 at 12PM ET / 9AM PT on Twitch and YouTube, hosted by Chess.com co-founder Danny Rensch and chess creator Alexandra Botez. It will be the first public measure of whether poker players want what chess players already have.