Anichess launches Round 1 of its Gambit Series, with 10,000 $CHECK on the leaderboard

In Brief:

• Anichess (official site) has started Round 1 of its Gambit Series, and the round stays open for six days.
• Entry is 100 $CHECK per match, and each match is worth 100 points. Winning three in a row earns another 100, and 10,000 $CHECK will be split across this round’s leaderboard.
• There are four rounds in the series, and the top two players over all of them get to skip the queue.

Round 1 of the Gambit Series, a time-limited competition based on the game’s Gambit mode, is now open in Anichess. The team announced on X that the round runs for six days.

Players pay 100 $CHECK to enter each match. Every match adds 100 points to a player’s round leaderboard score, and three consecutive wins bring a 100-point bonus. A total of 10,000 $CHECK will be distributed on this round’s leaderboard.

Four rounds, one shortcut

This is the first of four rounds. According to Anichess, the two strongest players across the whole series will “skip the queue.” The announcement didn’t explain where that queue leads or how results from all four rounds will be combined.

No dates have been shared for the later rounds yet, and the team hasn’t said whether each one will carry the same 10,000 $CHECK pool. The post covered only the rewards for this round.

How Gambit works

Gambit mode was introduced with Season 7 in March 2026. It uses a winner-takes-all format, with $CHECK as the buy-in. In every match both players receive randomly assigned spells, and three spells are disabled in this mode: Shot in the Dark, Juke and Shift.

Anichess is developed by Animoca Brands together with Chess.com, and Animoca presented the mode as a leveller at launch. “Gambit Mode is chess meets poker in @AnichessGame. Both players get random spells. Same conditions. No paid edge. Just skill, chaos, and one player taking it all,” Animoca Brands wrote in a post on X.

In Season 7 the buy-in was likewise 100 $CHECK, and each player also paid a platform fee of 15 $CHECK per match. The Gambit Series announcement didn’t clarify whether that fee also applies to series matches.

A smaller pool than past seasons

Compared with the season-long ladders that came before it, the series pays out far less. Season 7 promised total rewards of more than 1,000,000 $CHECK. Its Gambit leaderboard handed out 250,000 $CHECK each week to the top 50 players, ranked by total buy-ins, and at least 15 matches were required to qualify.

Season 7 also offered double leaderboard points for Gambit matches played in a daily three-hour Peak Hours window. Referrers received 10% of the platform fees paid by the players they had brought in, starting from each new player’s third match.

With Season 8, the Gambit ladder went back to zero while the 100 $CHECK buy-in stayed in place, with the winner taking the pot. “Season 8 is live. Every spell just got overpowered. 700,000 $CHECK on offer. 600,000 in the Gambit prize pool. One new spell that clears multiple pieces in a single cast,” Anichess said in an April post on X.

Scoring works differently in the Gambit Series. Where Season 7 ranked players by the amount they had bought in, this round awards a flat 100 points for every match plus a bonus for consecutive wins, so a player’s total rises with the number of matches played and the win streaks strung together.

Background

Because Anichess runs on Base, moves carry no gas fees. The game’s token, $CHECK, was recently listed on Coinbase and is tradable in the Coinbase app.

One further $CHECK product is on the studio’s roadmap. King’s Gambit, a casual survival game, is slated for Q4 2026 and is intended to give the token more uses. It is a separate title and is unrelated to the Gambit Series.

For the moment, each round of the series lasts six days. Matches cost 100 $CHECK each, and the Round 1 leaderboard is topped by a 10,000 $CHECK pool.