Home › Blog › AI Didn't Kill Chess. It Created the Biggest Boom in History.
250 million users. $150M+ in revenue, likely north of $200M. Zero spent on paid acquisition. Ever.
No primary capital has ever gone into this business. The founder describes himself as "unemployable."
The app is Chess.com.
Harry Stebbings called it "the most untold story in startups." After weeks researching it, I think he's underselling it.
Chess was the test case for artificial intelligence before AI was even a term. Alan Turing wrote the first chess program in 1952. For decades, scientists believed that a machine beating a human at chess meant a machine that could think. Chess wasn't just a game to the AI community. It was the test.
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player alive. It was the most watched human vs. machine moment in history until ChatGPT arrived 25 years later.
I recently read Kasparov's "Deep Thinking," published in 2017, six years before ChatGPT. His predictions are eerily accurate. He argued AI wouldn't destroy human creativity but liberate it. That the real danger wasn't AI becoming too powerful, but humans being too afraid to use it. That humans and machines working together would outperform either alone. He was one of the first world champions to push for chess engines as learning tools, especially for kids without access to coaches or clubs.
Here's the thing: computers surpassed humans at chess 30 years ago. The game should be "solved." It should be declining. Instead, chess is experiencing the biggest boom in its 1,500-year history. 250 million people on one platform. More humans playing today than at any point in history.
AI didn't kill chess. It created the conditions for chess to explode.
I think this is a preview of what happens across every category. As digital experiences become more abundant and cheaper to produce, the scarce things become more valuable. Human competition. Face-to-face interaction. The feeling of sitting across a board from another person. The more AI can do, the more people crave what it can't replicate.
Chess is proof that AI and human experience aren't in competition. They're in a flywheel.
Erik Allebest didn't start with a tech company. He started with an afterschool chess teaching business in college. Basic labor arbitrage: hire people to teach kids chess.
That became chess equipment e-commerce. "The Amazon of chess before Amazon did anything except books." But Google Ads CAC was killing margins.
Third attempt. Build a community. His MBA at Stanford was a turning point for self-awareness. He calls himself "unemployable" and says entrepreneurship was the only path that made sense.
In 2005, he bought the chess.com domain at a bankruptcy auction for $55K. Launched the platform in 2007. Then spent the next 15 years grinding. No VC. No pitch decks. Just building.
For 13 years, Chess.com grew steadily but quietly. 1M by 2010. 10M by 2014. 20M by 2017. 35M by June 2020. Respectable, but not the kind of numbers that make Tech Twitter lose its mind.
Then three things hit simultaneously.
COVID (March 2020). Chess needs no equipment and works perfectly on a screen. Massive global spike. One of the few games that translates perfectly to lockdown conditions.
The Queen's Gambit (October 2020). 62 million Netflix households in 28 days. Chess.com registrations jumped 500%+ YoY. An interesting detail from the 20VC podcast: this cohort subscribed at a higher rate than usual, but retained at a lower rate. Cultural moments drive signups but don't always create lifelong players.
PogChamps (June 2020). Chess.com convinced popular Twitch streamers to play chess on camera. 155,000 concurrent viewers. A 57% jump in watch hours. Chess went from being a sport to being entertainment. This unlocked an entirely new audience.
Result: 35M to 70M+ in 18 months. After taking 13 years to reach 35M.
Then the compounding kicked in. 75M by January 2022. 100M by December 2022. 200M by April 2025. And in late February 2026, Chess.com officially announced they cracked 250M registered members.
That's 2.5x growth from 100M to 250M in just over three years. On average, nearly 12 million new members join every year. And the cultural tailwinds aren't stopping: Netflix's Queen of Chess documentary (about Judit Polgar) launched in January 2026, and Untold: Chess Mates (about the Carlsen-Niemann controversy) premieres April 7, 2026.
The growth rate is accelerating, not slowing.
Free tier with ads. Paid tiers for an ad-free experience plus unlimited lessons, puzzles, and analysis tools.
On the 20VC podcast in early 2024, when Chess.com had around 150M members, Erik confirmed the company was doing "$100M+ in revenue." With 250M members now, subscriber growth continuing, and most paying users on the highest tier paying yearly, conservative estimates put current revenue at $150M+ and very likely north of $200M.
Here's how the math works. Chess.com reported 1.5 million active subscribers as of April 2025 (per TechCrunch). Most pay yearly. Most choose the highest paid tier. Paid subscriber retention is reportedly comparable to World of Warcraft, which is a staggering benchmark for any subscription product.
The paid conversion rate sits around 0.75-1.5% of total registered members. GP Bullhound's Consumer Subscription Software report benchmarks 2-10% free-to-paid as "healthy." Chess.com converts below 2% and still generates nine-figure revenue. The sheer scale of the free user base makes the math work even at sub-1% conversion.
Some other numbers from the podcast and public sources: around 10% weekly active users relative to total base. Users who get their first win are 2-3x more likely to retain long-term. That single first moment of success is everything for engagement. Chess.com optimizes heavily for it.
Erik described Chess.com as "not a metric-driven business." They focus on making the product better and let growth follow. In an era where every startup obsesses over dashboards and A/B tests, Chess.com built a $150M+ business by focusing on the game itself.
The margins are remarkable. Near-zero marginal cost software. Around 928 fully remote employees, no offices. Zero paid acquisition spend. They had enough cash on hand to write an $83 million check to acquire Play Magnus Group in 2022. No debt, no fundraising. Just operating cash flow.
GP Bullhound benchmarks 50%+ organic acquisition as "exceptional" for consumer subscription. Chess.com is at effectively 100% organic for paid user acquisition. They work with creators, sponsor events, and invest in content, but they've never run a single paid ad to acquire users.
This is the part most people get wrong.
No primary capital has ever entered the business. Zero. The General Atlantic deal and other investor involvement was entirely secondary: founders and early employees selling shares. Money went to people, not the company.
Erik described one early secondary transaction, at roughly a $20M valuation, as one of his worst decisions ever. It brought investors to the table who wanted liquidity and exits, forcing the company into conversations about growth timelines and fundraising that didn't fit their DNA. Even secondary money changes the dynamic. Once you have investors, even passive ones, the pressure to perform on someone else's timeline is real.
The business has been entirely self-funded from its own revenue for 18+ years. Every dollar of growth, every hire, every acquisition, funded by the chess players who use the platform.
General Atlantic's managing director Tanzeen Syed said at the time of their deal in early 2022 that Chess.com was still early in its growth story. At 75 million members and $100M+ revenue. She was right. They've more than tripled their user base since.
Erik's philosophy on scaling without paid acquisition: content drives user value and SEO. Capture demand on every platform. YouTube, Twitch, Shorts, TikTok. Always follow the audience wherever it goes. Work with chess creators as affiliates and ambassadors, creating real value for them by exposing them to the community. Capture search. The domain itself is an unfair advantage, obviously, but the SEO and content effort behind it is relentless.
As he put it: no money makes you very creative.
In August 2022, Chess.com acquired the Play Magnus Group for approximately $83 million in cash.
Play Magnus was co-founded by Magnus Carlsen himself in 2013. IPO'd on the Oslo Stock Exchange in October 2020. But the company was struggling to balance growth and profitability.
What Chess.com got in a single deal: the Champions Chess Tour (premier online competition with a ~$2M prize pool), Chessable (interactive chess learning marketplace), Chess24 (their biggest rival platform), and Magnus Carlsen signed as a Chess.com ambassador.
They bought their biggest competitor, the world champion's personal brand, and the most prestigious tournament series in chess. In one move. Paid in cash from their own revenue.
Then in December 2023, Endeavor/WME (Ari Emanuel's agency) came in for content development: documentaries, celebrity crossover, media rights. Chess debuted at the Esports World Cup in 2025, where Magnus won the $250K first prize. Ben Mezrich (author of The Social Network) is writing a book about the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal, and Emma Stone's production company bought the film rights.
That's what nearly two decades of self-funded profitability buys you. Optionality that funded competitors simply never have. You don't need anyone's permission to make an $83M move when you're playing with your own money.
Chess.com's growth flywheel is entirely organic.
The domain itself. Chess.com is the most obvious URL in the category. SEO dominance across every chess-related search term. Content creators who bring massive audiences organically: GothamChess (Levy Rozman, 5M YouTube subscribers), Hikaru Nakamura (2.3M subscribers), plus Chess.com's own channel (2.6M). Cultural moments driving viral spikes: Netflix shows, celebrity matches, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal. Sponsorships, creator partnerships, and event investments that build the ecosystem without running a single paid acquisition ad.
12.5 billion games played on the platform in 2023. 35 million games per day. 4 billion chess content views on YouTube that same year. 300,000+ members online at any given moment.
85% of new registrations come from outside the US. Available in 57 languages. The platform essentially grows itself.
GP Bullhound describes the ideal consumer subscription flywheel as: organic discovery, free user, engagement hook, paid conversion, retained subscriber, word of mouth, more organic discovery. Chess.com runs this loop at a scale most founders would consider impossible. Built entirely without paid user acquisition.
250 million users. $150M+ revenue. Every feature imaginable for playing chess online. The most dominant platform in their category by an order of magnitude.
But Chess.com does exactly $0 in anything offline.
No venue discovery. No offline game tracking. No in-person ratings. No event organization tools. No venue partnerships. No OTB (over-the-board) community infrastructure. Nothing.
This matters because chess is experiencing an IRL renaissance alongside the online boom. Clubs are filling up. Café chess nights are packed. Brands like Pieces and Knight are building entire businesses around chess culture and in-person play. Speed chess events at bars have waitlists. The same cultural wave that drove 250 million people to Chess.com is now driving millions of them to seek out real games across a real board.
FIDE, the international chess federation, has 1.64 million rated players worldwide. Chess.com has 250 million members. That's roughly a 150:1 ratio. The overwhelming majority who discovered chess online have never played a rated game in person. And there's virtually no infrastructure to help them bridge that gap.
Chess.com's CGO Albert Cheng (previously head of growth at Duolingo and Grammarly) said the sky's the limit. He's focused on the online platform. Which makes complete sense for Chess.com.
But the sky's the limit on the offline side too. And nobody is building for it.
I'm building CheckmateIRL. A mobile app for people who play chess in real life. Chess clock that tracks your games. Elo ratings earned at cafés and parks, not on a screen. 1,000+ venues mapped across 50+ countries. Clubs. Tournaments.
I'm not competing with Chess.com. I'm building for the gap they've explicitly chosen not to fill.
Kasparov's core thesis from "Deep Thinking" keeps proving right, and it was written years before the current AI wave: technology doesn't replace human experiences. It amplifies the demand for them. AI didn't kill chess. It created the biggest boom the game has ever seen. The more chess moved online, the more people discovered they wanted to play across a real board.
Every AI efficiency gain, every improvement in online chess, every new player who joins Chess.com and falls in love with the game increases the pool of people who eventually want to sit across a board from another human being.
Chess.com proved the market is massive, global, growing, and willing to pay. They built the digital infrastructure for the entire chess world.
Nobody has built the offline infrastructure. That's the lane.
Read our city guides to find where to play near you: Chess in New York, Chess in London, Chess in Berlin, Chess in Munich, Chess in Hamburg, Chess in Copenhagen, Chess in Cape Town. For park tables and giant boards worldwide, read the outdoor chess guide.
How many users does Chess.com have? As of February 2026, Chess.com has over 250 million registered members. The platform grew from 100 million to 250 million in just over three years, with roughly 12 million new members joining each year.
How much revenue does Chess.com make? Chess.com's founder Erik Allebest confirmed on the 20VC podcast in early 2024 that the company was doing over $100 million in revenue. With 250 million members and continued subscriber growth, conservative estimates put current revenue at $150M+ and likely north of $200M.
Has Chess.com ever raised venture capital? No. No primary capital has ever entered the business. The General Atlantic deal and other investor involvement was entirely secondary, meaning founders and early employees sold shares. The company itself has been funded entirely by its own revenue for 18+ years.
What did Chess.com pay for the Play Magnus Group? Chess.com acquired the Play Magnus Group for approximately $83 million in cash in August 2022. The deal included Chess24, Chessable, the Champions Chess Tour, and Magnus Carlsen as a brand ambassador. The entire acquisition was paid from operating cash flow.
Is there an app for playing chess in real life? CheckmateIRL is a mobile app built specifically for over-the-board chess players. It includes a chess clock with game tracking, offline Elo ratings, 1,000+ mapped venues across 50+ countries, and tools for clubs and tournaments. Available on iOS and Android.
Sources: 20VC podcast (Erik Allebest interview, Feb 2024), TechCrunch (April 2025), Sherwood News (June 2024), Inc. magazine, GP Bullhound Consumer Subscription Software Report, Chess.com blog (250M announcement, Feb 2026), "Deep Thinking" by Garry Kasparov (2017), BusinessWire