In Brief:
- Anichess (official site) has a $CHECK tournament on the calendar every night this week, and four of them are free to enter.
- The spell format changes from night to night. Three spells on some evenings, randomized spells on others, and a single spell for the entire game on Sunday.
- $CHECK payouts are attached to every tournament on the schedule.
There is a chess tournament every night this week at Anichess, and entry is free for four of them.
According to the game, the spell format shifts each night. Players receive three spells on some evenings. Other evenings hand out random spells. On Sunday, each player gets one spell that has to last the whole game.
ok, here is the deal
play chess and get $CHECK
a tournament every night this week, four of them free, and you don't get the same game twice.
some nights you get three spells, some nights they're random, and on Sunday you get one spell for the whole game. every tournament pays@AnichessView on X ↗
“play chess and get $CHECK,” the studio wrote on X. “a tournament every night this week, four of them free, and you don’t get the same game twice.”
How the circuit runs
Season 9: The Circuit went live this month, structured around a daily event framework with two competition windows: 21:00 to 23:00 HKT (13:00 to 15:00 UTC) and 09:00 to 11:00 HKT (01:00 to 03:00 UTC).
Wins are worth three points, draws one, and losses nothing. Weekly payouts are determined by the daily leaderboards and released once fair-play checks are complete, with confirmed winners named on Discord.
Prize money goes to the top five, split 35 percent, 25 percent, 18 percent, 12 percent and 10 percent. Players can enter for free or take a Gambit buy-in, priced between 50 and 100 $CHECK depending on the day.
Stages and Sanctums arrived with Season 9 as well. Daily rewards and playoff eligibility are laid out through Stages, while Sanctums exist for spell practice. Layered over the regular calendar are Special Events, each governed by its own rules.
Spells set the terms
Players lock in either one or three spells before the game begins. Any turn without a cast earns one mana, up to a ceiling of eight, and each spell carries its own mana price and cast limit.
There is no checkmate in Anichess. It uses Kingslay instead, meaning victory requires capturing the king outright, and moves that standard chess would rule illegal are permitted. The only routes to a draw are threefold repetition and the 50-move rule.
Earlier seasons
The Season 8 pot came to 700,000 $CHECK, with 600,000 of that sitting in the Gambit prize pool. The Gambit ladder was reset for that season, which used a flat 100 $CHECK buy-in per match on a winner-takes-the-pot basis and doubled points from 13:30 to 16:30 UTC.
More than one million $CHECK was handed out across three competitive tracks during Season 7 in March 2026. That season’s grand finale ran on a 300 CHECK buy-in and a three-minute time control, with a 300,000 CHECK leaderboard prize pool.
Supply of $CHECK is fixed at 1 billion tokens, 59.38 percent of which is earmarked for community and ecosystem growth. The token does more than pay tournament entry: it also covers ranked matches and staking for Mate Points, the non-transferable points that grant access to the weekly Checkmate Arena draw.
A subsidiary of Animoca Brands and an official Chess.com partner, Anichess is built on Base and has surpassed 1 million players, including grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri.
Esports organization Team Secret came aboard the Checkmate ecosystem as a partner and took on the CHECK token, opening with a run of Anichess tournaments. Running alongside are community events such as the Rising Stars III tournament on Lichess, which offered a $600 prize pool and awarded $200 in CHECK to the winner.
Against all that, this week’s nightly lineup is a modest affair. Anichess signed off its post with a two-word note on the terms: “every tournament pays.”