Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday.
Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. More than 20 million games of chess are played every day on the platform.
“[Chess has] got this durability to it,” Albert Cheng, the chief growth officer at Chess.com told TechCrunch. “It’s been played for over 1,500 years, which is just amazing. And even Chess.com is not a brand new company. It’s been around for almost 20 years. It feels really dynamic.”
The company has expanded a lot since its roots as an online forum for IRL chess players to discuss their matches. Chess.com now offers full chess matches against other people or bots, daily games and puzzles, news about the chess world, the ability to stream chess competitions, and more.
Cheng credits the company’s continued product innovation as one of the reasons it has seen strong and sustained growth. For example, the company released an AI game review feature in 2021 — yes, there is always an AI angle — that uses AI to summarize how a player did in a game and to flag potential improvements. He added that the majority of new users on Chess.com are beginners, and while the platform is designed for players of all levels, such features can help foster a love for the game for these new members.
The company has also been able to ride the increased interest in chess over the past few years. Chess, along with many other games, gained a lot of popularity during the pandemic as people looked for online ways to entertain themselves through COVID-19 lockdowns. In response, Chess.com had to bulk up its infrastructure to be able to support the new demand.
Netflix’s chess-focused miniseries, “The Queen’s Gambit,” further fueled interest when it was released in 2020. Since then, numerous events have sparked new interest in the game. In 2022, the chess world was rocked by a cheating scandal involving five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. Competitive chess will also be featured in the Esports World Cup for the first time this year.
The game has also gotten increasingly global, Cheng said, with around 85% of new user registrations coming from outside the U.S. The current World Champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, hails from India.
Cheng — the former head of product, growth, and monetization at Grammarly and Duolingo — added that he seems to hear of a new “high-profile” chess player every day and cited the recent chess match between F1 racing stars Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc playing online chess against each other.
“I think the sky’s the limit here, and the more that we can continue to grow the game by leveraging that organic interest that already exists in these adjacent communities, we’d be foolish not to explore it,” Cheng said. “So I’m really excited by those opportunities.”
