Chess.com was able to sit down with each of the four major presidential candidates last week as they turned their attention to courting the ever-important chess demographic. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein were all interviewed by Chess.com as they look for votes on the 64 squares.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-interviews-trump-clinton-johnson-stein
Sorry but this is a parody
as noted immediately following the “interviews”.
I’ve been a member of chess.com since 2009–apparently they spent $2M to acquire the domain name ~10 years ago–got fairly involved, got falsely accused of cheating and, with no recourse once they decide I was using machine assistance, my handle (and more importantly, my group with a ton of analysis and posts) was wiped out.
I returned under a different handle and now mainly stick to speed chess tournaments during mid-evening in Europe (mid-afternoon ET), which brings out 3-5 solid-to-near-master-level players. Their userbase skews quite young (often 10 and under), and I believe they also operate chesskid.com. As a freemium service, they give out Platinum memberships to anyone who can produce as FIDE card that shows they earned a Candidate Master title or greater.
chess.com steers clear of chess politics–chessbase.com and to a much lesser extent, theweekinchess.com handle that sort of thing–and this is their first-ever mention of politics ever. Even Brexit was off-limits. Even in cheating in chess, where cheating is such a serious problem that the elites get wanded for electronics prior to game play and you can’t even bring your own pen to a game, discussions have been cut off by the staff when they didn’t like where the conversation was going, even though it was going to a highly reasonable place. Their “free trial” is almost impossible to keep free, I had to submit a bug report in order to stop them from charging my CC.
I have noticed that the videos they sell often contain massive errors in positions that have been known for centuries. An FM blowing a deliberately slow explanation of the Lucena position cratered my opinion of their instructional material.
I use chesscube.com to warm up and chess.com to slug it out when I’m feeling feisty and more competitive than usual, and stick strictly to speed chess as that’s the only place I can find worthwhile opposition. My serious competitive chess is strictly within the well-established ICCF, where I’ve earned a spot in a major tournament beginning within the next six months.