10 Best Christmas Gifts for Chess Players in 2025

Chessbook is a bit of a lesser-known tool for learning openings. It has all sorts of features, like monitoring your online games for opening mistakes, finding model games in the openings you play, generating an opening report on your best and worst openings, etc. But the core of the site is a system for building and training your repertoire, that respects your time as a student of the game. It’s not going to ask you to memorize thousands of lines or go 20 moves deep in theory, like a lot of courses out there. It finds exactly what lines people at your level are playing, and preps you for those. If you use it to build a repertoire, then train with it 10 minutes a day for a few weeks, you’ll find yourself out-prepping virtually everyone at your level (as long as that level doesn’t end with “_ Master”).

At $8/month or $80/yr, it’s one of the cheaper chess sites around. It’s what I use to make sure I remember all my opening prep. I’ve also published a handful of free pre-made repertoires on Chessbook, so if you want to copy some of my repertoires that I’ve spent hundreds of hours building, check it out!

Every chess player plays training games over the board. Serious players write their moves down. I can’t tell you how many scoresheets I’ve lost over the years because I had the moves written down in random notebooks or pieces of paper. A proper scorebook with room for 100 games will be a useful Christmas gift for any ambitious chess player.

A professional, wooden, beautifully carved chess set with which you can play online. This is a gift for really close people, like a husband or a son. It’s expensive, and remarkably useful. Chestnut Pro has full piece recognition, and you can use it to analyze, play online games, and even for chess 960. It comes with an integrated AI training tool with over 20 levels of difficulty, making it a great training partner as well as a great chess set.
I’ve had it for a year now and I love it. I have reviewed it in a recent video. Watch it if you’d like to find out more about Chessnut Pro.

This is by far the best complex board game in existence, chess excluded. A fantasy setting, numerous races each with unique mechanics, and thrilling gameplay. I love it because there is no luck involved. You rely on strategy and planning to gain the upper hand. My friends and I play D&D and many different board games. Terra Mystica is a game for hardcore players. Not for people who think Catan is the pinnacle of games.

A chess clock is something every player needs. Many tournaments require you to bring your own. And this is the best one out there. The new DGT 2500 is easy to work with, it’s sturdy, which is important when you play blitz or bullet and stuff starts flying off the table, and the display was made so that even half-blind people could easily read clock times.

An essential tool every player needs for attending tournaments, playing training games and studying chess is a classical, tournament-sized chess set. I use this one from the US Chess Federation. It’s affordable and very high quality. It comes with a quiver bag, which is great since it saves you from carrying your pieces in a shopping bag. That’s what I did for years.  

The set is 20″ x 20″ in size, it features rank and file labels on all four sides, and it’s manufactured out of high-grade vinyl and will always lie flat, which is the most important thing about a chess set.

This may be the only fancy gadget I’ve ever wanted. I write everything on paper. Everything that matters, that is. Remarkable allows you to keep doing that while providing all the benefits of the modern age cavemen like myself tend to avoid. With it you can write and sketch in color, it’s light and portable and your files on it are easy to organize and store. Like having endless moleskine notebooks.

This easy to pack chess set is a perfect gift for your younglings. They can bring it along and cure their boredom while visiting all the aunts and uncles this Christmas, and not bother you while you listen to all the gossip that happened since last year. When unrolled, the chess board is 18.90”x11.10” in size and it fits anywhere, making it the perfect mix between being easily portable and easy to play serious chess on. It’s crafted from high-quality leather and affordable as well, which makes it a perfect gift.

The only reason I’m including these is so that you have something to buy for people who play chess that you don’t particularly like. Chess socks are a cheap way to say “I care enough to know that you play chess, but not enough to get you anything decent.” I asked Lucija to read this paragraph. She says she’s insulted and she’ll take away all the socks she’d given me over the years.