In October 2020, Netflix released The Queen’s Gambit, a coming-of-age drama about a (fictional) young chess prodigy who overcomes her upbringing, gender stereotypes, and alcohol dependency to conquer the high-stakes world of competitive chess.
The show rocketed up the streaming charts—and even though chess mostly served as narrative scaffolding, its success poured fuel on a pandemic-era chess boom. As lockdown-weary people looked for new obsessions, millions gravitated toward the world’s oldest strategy game. And sitting right at the center of that surge was Chess.com: the platform that’s turned online chess into a modern media-and-subscription machine.
When co-founders Erik Allebest and Jay Severson bought the Chess.com domain for about $55,000 in 2005, they initially envisioned it as a community hub for enthusiasts. But rising demand for online play pushed them to build a full chess portal, and Chess.com (the platform) launched in 2007—just in time for the internet to start treating chess less like a niche pastime and more like a daily habit.
Since then, Chess.com has expanded into a sprawling ecosystem: live play, lessons, puzzles, analysis, creator content, esports-style events, and a pipeline that funnels casual viewers into paying members.
The Chess.com Fortress
Owning the most obvious, search-friendly name in the game doesn’t hurt. But Chess.com’s dominance isn’t just branding—it’s also the result of a long run of acquisitions that steadily tightened its grip on the online chess landscape.
Over the years, the company picked up rival communities like ChessPark (2009) and ChessVibes (2013). Then came the biggest move: buying Play Magnus Group in a deal widely reported at around $83M, which brought major properties (and Magnus Carlsen’s orbit) under the same roof.
Chess.com has also leaned hard into streaming culture—because yes, huge audiences now watch chess the way they watch esports. Creators such as Levy “GothamChess” Rozman and Hikaru Nakamura have helped turn the game into daily entertainment, while Chess.com has increasingly packaged elite competition for online audiences.
In late 2020, the company secured broadcast rights for the 2021 FIDE World Championship match, signaling how seriously it was taking the “chess as media” lane. More recently, it has pushed big online events—running the 2023 season of the Champions Chess Tour under its banner (the tour itself began earlier, in 2020).
The numbers underline just how enormous the platform has become. Chess.com says 12.5 billion games were played in 2023—roughly 35 million games per day. For comparison, free-to-use rival Lichess reported just over 1 billion games in 2023. And when The Queen’s Gambit hit, Chess.com moved quickly with Beth Harmon-themed bots for fans who wanted to play the show’s star.
Chess Is Big Business Now
Historically, chess hasn’t been a sport that spreads wealth widely. Even among the world’s ~2,000 grandmasters, many make a living through teaching, coaching, appearances, and sponsorships rather than prize money alone.
Meanwhile, Chess.com has built a classic freemium engine: ads and limited features for free users, with subscriptions unlocking unlimited lessons, puzzles, and analysis tools. The big question is how many people actually pay.
One widely cited data point comes from the 20VC podcast, which reported Chess.com at 150 million members and $100M+ in revenue. Depending on how you model subscription tiers and ad revenue, that suggests a relatively small percentage of users go premium—potentially low single digits—yet still enough to power a very large business. If the conversion rate is even modestly higher (as many freemium products see), the revenue picture climbs quickly.
A Checkered Past, and a New Era
Chess has always moved in waves—periods where the game suddenly captures the public imagination. Bobby Fischer’s famous “Game of the Century” win over Donald Byrne in 1956 helped spark a U.S. boom that eventually peaked when Fischer won the World Championship in 1972.
Later, computing transformed chess into a symbol of human-versus-machine competition. That cultural arc hit its most famous moment in the 1990s: Garry Kasparov vs. IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov won their 1996 match, but Deep Blue took the 1997 rematch, reshaping how the public understood chess mastery in the computer age.
Today’s engines are vastly stronger than any human—and they run on everyday hardware. But chess is not “solved” in the strict, mathematical sense (aside from certain endgames). What engines have done is compress the mystery: they can evaluate positions at superhuman depth, turning preparation into something closer to a science.
False Moves: Cheating, Detection, and the Arms Race
That same progress has also made cheating easier—especially online. With a second device and a strong engine, anyone can get “perfect” help in real time. And that creates an endless arms race between cheaters and platforms trying to catch them.
Chess.com says it now closes 100,000+ accounts per month for fair play violations, using statistical and behavioral signals to flag suspicious play. The tension around cheating boiled into the mainstream again in 2022, when Magnus Carlsen lost to Hans Niemann and controversy exploded across the chess world.
The legal dispute that followed was later resolved via settlement, but the episode underscored a truth that online chess can’t escape: the better engines get, the more valuable trust becomes.
Check, Please
Computers haven’t killed chess—they’ve remade it. Engines raised the skill ceiling, streaming brought in new audiences, and platforms like Chess.com packaged an ancient game into something that behaves like a modern digital business.
And in a moment when AI is pressuring creative and competitive fields alike, chess offers a strange kind of optimism: even when the “perfect” answer exists, people still show up—because the point isn’t perfection. It’s the fight to find the move anyway.