Chess.com Surpasses Expectations with 250 Million Registered Users Amid AI Boom

Thirty years after IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, the game of chess is experiencing a resurgence in popularity. Chess.com, the world's largest chess platform, boasts over 250 million registered users and 10 million daily active users, with annual revenue exceeding $200 million.

In an interview, Erik Allebest, CEO of Chess.com, attributed the growth to three small incidents that occurred before the current AI boom: the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a surge in registrations due to Netflix's hit series The Queen's Gambit, and the rise of chess content creators on social media platforms.

Allebest noted that after each wave of traffic receded, the user baseline remained higher than the previous level. He attributed this to people finding chess genuinely fun, rather than just being recommended by others. This is in stark contrast to machines playing chess, which only view winning as a means to an end.

Allebest quoted a widely cited sentence on the podcast: 'People want to acquire human skills even when machines have far surpassed humans in these fields; people appreciate exceptional human craftsmanship even when machines can do it better.'