Seirawan Chess Gets Its Own Championship, Sept 30-Oct 2

Chess.com has put a number and a date on its newest variant event. The Chess.com Seirawan Chess Championship runs from September 30 to October 2, with a $2,500 prize fund attached.

The variant itself is not new. Seirawan chess, sometimes written as S-Chess, was co-created by GM Yasser Seirawan, a four-time US Champion and one of the strongest American players of the 1980s and 1990s, along with FM Bruce Harper. Their idea was simple on paper: keep the standard 8x8 board and the standard 16 pieces per side, but add two more.

Those additions are the hawk and the elephant, and they don’t start on the board. The hawk moves like a combined bishop and knight, the elephant like a combined rook and knight, and each side’s extra piece only enters play once a bishop, knight, or rook has vacated its starting square and the player chooses to drop the new piece there instead of making a normal move.

That entry mechanic is the whole hook of the variant: it adds a layer of timing and calculation that doesn’t exist in orthodox chess, where every piece’s start square is fixed from move one.

That distinguishes Seirawan chess from the other major alternative format gaining traction in top-level chess, Fischer Random (Chess960), which scrambles the back rank but keeps the same 16 pieces with no new powers to learn.

Seirawan chess instead keeps the familiar opening setup intact and adds genuinely new material, which is part of why it has stayed a curiosity rather than displacing 960 as the preferred break from memorized opening theory.

Chess.com running a standalone championship for it fits a broader pattern the site has leaned into this year: building out events and content around formats and audiences beyond classical over-the-board play. The company’s recent $15,000-a-month wager on esports-style broadcasting is part of that same push toward alternative formats and audiences beyond a strictly classical crowd.

A $2,500 prize fund is modest by the standards of Chess.com’s marquee events, but that’s consistent with how variant championships are usually pitched: as a showcase for the format itself rather than a high-stakes qualifier. The three-day window, September 30 through October 2, suggests a compact scheduling around a handful of days rather than a sprawling multi-week structure.

What isn’t yet clear from the announcement is the specific bracket, time control, or the list of players committed to compete, details that typically surface closer to an event’s start.

For now, the headline fact is the one Chess.com has put out front: a three-day championship built entirely around a piece set that hasn’t sat on a standard chessboard in most players’ memory, with elephants and hawks doing work no orthodox piece can.