At Web Summit Vancouver last month, Danny Rensch, founder and chief chess officer of Chess.com, asked the audience for a show of hands: Who had seen Untold: Chess Matesthe Netflix documentary about the 2022 Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal that rocked the world of professional chess? Rensch, who appeared prominently in the film, has become one of the most visible figures in chess as the game's massive online platform has expanded into media, subscriptions and product partnerships.
Rensch's path to co-founding Chess.com was unusual. In 2005, Internet entrepreneurs Erik Allebest and Jay Severson purchased the Chess.com domain at a bankruptcy auction for their fledgling Internet chess business. But the company that exists today began to take shape much later, after Rensch joined in 2008 and sought a bigger vision involving live video streaming, training and community. “They had the idea to be MySpace for Chess, a small idea with many domain names. But I was like, no, no, no, this is the beginning of the future. Chess is made for the digital age, and it is coming to the Internet,” he told the Observer on the sidelines of the Web Summit.
Today, Chess.com claims to have more than 250 million members and generates an estimated $150 million in annual revenue. It hosts more than 10 million chess games every day, and its business now extends beyond gameplay into coaching, events, creator content and advertising.
That increase helped make Rensch a recurring figure in chess sources this year. Besides that Untold: Chess Matesdocumentary series Grandmotherswhich also stars Rensch, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. The three-part series follows modern chess through the lens of Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen's attempt to launch a new chess league.
“The story initially focused on the players, but I realized that the drama happened without them,” Grandmothers director Liz Mandelup told the Observer. “Danny has an amazing story. It's almost crazy not to include it.”
Last year, Rensch was published Black Squares: How Chess Saved My Lifea memoir that traces how chess shaped his life before and after his formative years in Arizona's governing body. This book provides important context for how that experience shaped his worldview and the company he built.
Rensch grew up in a small, financially integrated group in rural Arizona called the Church of Immortal Consciousness, which was run by Trina Kamp and her husband Steven. He found chess at nine o'clock after watching Searching for Bobby Fischerand he made rapid progress. By the time he was 12 years old, chess had been declared his divine calling, and he was becoming increasingly estranged from his mother as the group controlled more of his life.
There is even a chapter in between Black Squares called “Sectarian Works,” which was to be read satirically. The point is that people can do extraordinary things when they come together around a common goal.
Rensch recognizes this term. “Cults work.” Until it doesn't work,” he writes, and his line when a healthy group dynamic turns dangerous is easy. “The moment it tells you it's the only one with the answers is when it becomes a cult,” he said.
The boom of the Internet in the mid-2000s helped bring him out of that world. Bored and bedridden while recovering from major surgery to repair hearing lost from years of medical neglect living under a cult, Rensch taught himself search engines and SEO. From there, he came to see chess as a product that was a natural fit for the digital age.
Rensch helped Chess.com ride the internet's next wave from live streaming to social media to AI In the years leading up to the pandemic, the company invested heavily in attracting top and powerful creators, as well as in live streaming and anti-cheat systems. As a result, when the lock enters the world, and TV shows like Netflix The Queen's Gambit popular chess for many people, traffic and registration it went up. “Chess.com accounted for about 95 percent of the growth of the chess community,” Rensch wrote during that period Black Squares, and there was no decline.
The company's recurring revenue business combines utility and entertainment, using subscriptions to fund features that help players improve while creating enough content and community to keep them engaged. Most of the revenue comes from nearly 2 million subscribers on three levels, more than half on the $119-a-year Diamond plan. Advertising still makes up a relatively small part of the business, but the company is increasing its direct ad sales as it looks to attract blue-chip and luxury brands.
Unlike traditional media companies that “gamble” on expensive intellectual property and hope that subscribers follow, Rensch said, Chess.com is built to tell stories on top of an already profitable product. Its media arm, including YouTube and Twitch programming and a network of creators, has grown out of an ecosystem of players who are already paying for the game. That gives the company a built-in audience and a business model based on usage instead of guesswork.
Rensch sees that structure as one reason why Chess.com has remained relevant to its users in a way that its children's collection never did. “I feel very grateful that we could not even allow money to control if we wanted to, because the game is owned by the community,” he said.
His broader point is that communities can act as a check on institutions if they have real agencies. In chess, players, creators and fans can move freely on social media, making Chess.com responsive in a way that many companies do not.
And given that IBM Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at a game 30 years ago, what business lessons does the world of chess have for all of us today? “We live in a world where more people are playing chess than ever before,” he told the Web Summit audience. “People still value the journey more than the destination. There are reasons for you to be successful and more productive, but chess has shown that the process of learning and failing while striving for perfection, knowing you will never achieve it, is not just BS. Otherwise, chess would be dead.”
