Advent of Chess with Magnus Carlsen returns!

The yearly Advent of Chess returns

Offerspill, the chess club founded by Magnus Carlsen, returns yet again with another edition of Advent of Chess. Starting December 1st, each day of advent will feature unorthodox chess problems like helpmates, selfmates, and retrograde problems, but no regular problems like “White to play and win” and “Find the mate in 2”.

Each correctly solved problem earns you one ticket in the drawing for a chessboard signed by Magnus Carlsen! And even if you don’t win the grand prize, there are plenty of achievements to collect, and our Leaderboard lets you see how you stack up against other participants.

If you want to prepare for these types of problems, you can browse all our previous problems by category on our new category page. This year also features some completely new categories not seen before, but these will be kept a secret until the problems are revealed.

Last year’s edition had more than 30,000 visitors in total, and more than a thousand of them solved at least one problem. The calendar features problems of varying difficulty, so anyone from beginner to world champions should find a suitable challenge (7-time World Chess Solving Champion, GM Kacper Piorun, participated last year, of course solving all 24 problems). Log in on adventofchess.com to join the fun, starting December 1st! You can also join our Discord community to connect with other participants and stay updated.

Clubs

A new feature this year is Clubs – Clubs on Advent of Chess let you bring people together to compete and track progress on a shared leaderboard. Whether it’s for your local chess club, a friendly competition among friends or colleagues, Clubs make Advent of Chess more social. You can create a Club and then invite friends by sending them the invite code.

Create a club here (requires being logged in).

Are you a chess composer?

If you are a chess composer that creates problems under any unorthodox category and want your problem featured in the calendar, we have some days open for user submitted problems! Send your problem to hi@adventofchess.com, and we’ll take a look at them. As an example, JoWovrin composed the problem for Day 19 last year, earning him the special Composer achievement!