Home › Blog › Chess Is Booming. Where Are the Boards? | Checkmate IRL
More than 600 million people play chess regularly.
Open Lichess or Chess.com at any time of day and you'll see it, hundreds of thousands of people grinding puzzles, playing blitz, climbing the ladder. Chess creators are pulling millions of views on Twitch and YouTube. Tyler, the Creator plays it. So do Timothée Chalamet, Dua Lipa, and Timbaland.
After The Queen's Gambit, chess set sales went through the roof. And just last week, Duolingo launched chess as a new category in their learning app.
The game has gone mainstream again. But there's a weird disconnect:
Where is all this momentum in real life?
Go outside.
Walk into a café.
Look around a park.
Check the bulletin board at your local chess club.
More often than not, you'll find empty chairs and dusty boards. At best, maybe a few dedicated regulars. But nothing resembling the millions of people who play every day online.
I live in Germany, where chess is quietly thriving, digitally.
Chess.com and Lichess see hundreds of thousands of monthly users just in Germany. But fewer than 100,000 people are officially active in chess clubs.
We've reached the point where an entire generation has learned chess online. They follow creators, do puzzles on the train, and send each other game links instead of memes. But when it comes to actually playing in person, the energy drops off.
Why?
We've seen this pattern in other spaces:
People want real-life connection. They want flexible formats, lightweight competition, casual social rituals. And yet, in most cities, chess hasn't caught up. You still have to commit to a club, show up every week at 6PM, and play classical games against the same three people in total silence.
Meanwhile, the majority of players online are blitz-first, flexible, and social by nature. The formats don't match. The settings don't either.
There's no easy way to:
That's the question I kept coming back to.
I wasn't trying to build a company. I just wanted something that helped me, and people like me, play more real-life chess. Without all the ceremony. Without all the friction.
So I started working on a tool.
Checkmate IRL is a lightweight app for chess lovers who want to bring the game back into the real world.
It helps you:
It's built with an offline-first architecture (you can fully use the chess clock without internet), and it's designed to feel more like a social companion than a tournament system. Think: Strava or Playtomic, but for chess.
The app is now live on iOS. Download it and let me know what you think!
Chess has always been about more than moves.
It's about focus. Connection. Shared tension. Social rhythm.
We've mastered how to do it online.
Now it's time to figure out how to bring that energy back to real life.
If you've ever wanted to play more chess, but weren't sure where or how, you're not alone. That's what I'm trying to build for. Start here: how to start playing chess in real life.