In Brief:
- Anichess (official site) is running a $CHECK tournament every night this week, with four of them free to enter.
- No two nights use the same spell format. Some nights give players three spells, some randomize them and Sunday’s event allows one spell for the entire game.
- Every tournament on the schedule pays out $CHECK.
Anichess is running a chess tournament every night this week, and four of them cost nothing to enter.
Each night uses a different spell format, the game said. Some nights players get three spells. On other nights the spells are random. Sunday’s event gives each player one spell for 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
“play chess and get $CHECK,” Anichess said in a post 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
Anichess launched Season 9: The Circuit this month with a daily event framework built on 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).
Scoring is three points for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. Daily leaderboards feed into weekly payouts, which go out after fair-play verification. Confirmed winners are announced on Discord.
The top five split the prize pool at 35 percent, 25 percent, 18 percent, 12 percent and 10 percent. Entry options include free access alongside Gambit buy-ins that run from 50 to 100 $CHECK depending on the day.
Season 9 also introduced Stages and Sanctums. Stages map out daily rewards and playoff eligibility. Sanctums are for spell practice. The season carries Special Events with their own rules on top of the regular schedule.
Spells set the terms
Before a game starts, players choose either one or three spells. They earn one mana each turn they don’t cast, capped at eight, and every spell has its own mana cost and cast limit.
Anichess drops checkmate in favor of Kingslay, where the win comes from capturing the king outright. Moves that would be illegal in standard chess are allowed. Draws happen only through threefold repetition or the 50-move rule.
Earlier seasons
Season 8 put 700,000 $CHECK on offer, 600,000 of it in the Gambit prize pool. That season reset the Gambit ladder and set a flat 100 $CHECK buy-in per match, winner takes the pot, with double points between 13:30 and 16:30 UTC.
Season 7, in March 2026, distributed more than one million $CHECK across three competitive tracks. Its grand finale used a 300 CHECK buy-in, a three-minute time control and a 300,000 CHECK leaderboard prize pool.
$CHECK has a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, with 59.38 percent allocated to community and ecosystem growth. Beyond tournament entry, it covers ranked matches and staking for Mate Points, the non-transferable points used to enter the weekly Checkmate Arena draw.
Anichess is an Animoca Brands subsidiary and an official Chess.com partner. It runs on Base and counts more than 1 million players, among them grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri.
Team Secret joined the Checkmate ecosystem as an esports partner and adopted the CHECK token, starting with a series of Anichess tournaments. Community events run in parallel, including the Rising Stars III tournament on Lichess, which carried a $600 prize pool and paid $200 for first place in CHECK.
The nightly slate is smaller than any of that. Anichess closed its post with two words on the terms: “every tournament pays.”
