Surprising Factors Behind the Chess Boom
What if the secret of making money in chess is you can't make money from chess?
British chess legend Mickey Adams was crushing yet another tournament. The best news of all? He was facing a player more than 1000 rating points lower than him. And that was a yahoo chess rating.
But this was no ordinary chess tournament. It was a chess poker tournament1. You start with six rounds of chess. Each win gives you extra chips into the turbo poker event, and that’s where the real winner is crowned. So chess definitely helps you win, but just one big poker hand and a chess noob could leapfrog a Grandmaster. The event mirrored the essence of poker: skill helps, but there are no guarantees.
Mickey Adams ended up losing, to Kenny Shei, best known for his skills in Limit Poker, deuce to seven, and now for defeating the eight-time British Chess Champion in a tournament.
Poker and chess shaking hands was a powerful metaphor for the end of era. In 2014, PokerStars founder Isai Scheinberg sold the company for just under 5 billion dollars. In a crowning moment, Isai himself won a tournament, surrounded by friends and former employees.
During the chess poker festival, I ran into Isai at a restaurant in the Isle of Man. He was also sponsoring the IOM Chess International, an event that later blossomed into the Grand Swiss, one of the most important events on the calendar.
At the time, Isai wanted to talk tactics, as he was fascinated by puzzles on chess dot com. Fascinated may be an understatement. A week or so later, Scheinberg reached out to me for an intro to the chess dot com leadership. I got him in touch and the Scheinberg family ultimately bought a large stake in the company2. The family also sponsors the FIDE Candidates and Women’s Candidates.
Isai explained to me why he decided to get so involved in the business of chess.
“Before 2015, I was playing chess with friends a few times a year. After you introduced me to chess.com I saw how easy and interesting is to play online and solve puzzles. I also researched and found that there are 100s of millions of people like me, playing a bit and not aware of online. So I concluded that it's inevitable that a lot more people will discover online chess.”
Chess has flourished in the years since that chess poker festival, with chess dot com taking a large share of headlines, especially since their 2022 merger with Play Magnus. CEO and co-founder Erik Allebest has done a number of recent interviews offering more insight into the company’s stratospheric growth to 100 Million dollars in annual revenue and over 600 employees.
For so many years, people told me chess could never become THIS popular. We know all the most striking reasons that they were wrong: Online blitz, Twitch, The Queen’s Gambit, Magnus Carlsen, Scholastic chess.
But some of the reasons behind chess’s explosive growth are less obvious. Those are the ones I want to talk about in this post. You could call them lucky breaks for a game with no luck. But as any good chess poker player knows, luck is temporary.
1. Don’t Bet on It
Poker boomed hard in the mid 2000s after accountant Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event via an $86 PokerStars satellite. For years poker blossomed with TV coverage, online poker, charity events, new poker tours and game formats. Till an ominous day in April 2011, that we call “Black Friday.” That is when the DOJ shut down online poker in the USA, showing us how the industry could collide catastrophically with regulators.
Playing poker for real money involves a lot of regulations, and every country and U.S. state has different ones, whether it’s age restrictions (21+ in USA, 18+ in many other countries), tax laws or gambling awareness campaigns.
It’s great to see poker rebound in recent years, in large part due to the strength of the culture, hard work of industry people and the rise of poker content creators.
As a chess poker player, I’ve been told hundreds of times over the years that chess is harder to popularize and profit from than poker, because regular people can’t play for money, and with no real money, there’s no rake.
But what if chess flipped this truth?
The reason chess can make money is that you can’t make money from it.
No real money at stake means fewer regulations and no age restrictions.
In the late 2010s, the attention economy and the rise of social media influencers exploded. Chess was perfectly suited to benefit and grab millions of eyeballs3, of all ages, and with so few restrictions.
2. Ancient game, evergreen aesthetic.
The Chess board is really well suited for content, especially vertical reels. The design of a chessboard is so classic, it’s easy to accessorize it, even without a graphic designer bone in you. Whether it’s with a camera feed, or some simple text below or above it, the chess board is an uncluttered and richly aesthetic canvas that’s perfect for social media. Advertisers and set-designers have known this for a while, which is why a sleek chessboard is so often used in ads and in TV scenes.
3. Cheat Day and Chess
Short term, cheating and chess was good for the game. In 2022, a joke that a Grandmaster used anal beads to cheat went viral4, making it to the Daily Show, the BBC, and now even promising a Hollywood movie.
It wasn’t just about drama: the constant buzz showed how anti-fragile chess is. Cheating in such a pure and respected game brought shock. Chess’s pristine image was reinforced by the surprise itself, especially when digging showed no proof of over the board cheating by Hans Niemann5, let alone at the Sinquefield Cup. As time passed and the story showed remarkable staying power, it became clear that the game had not only weathered the harsh chapter, it thrived through it.
This all reminded me of a short-lived YouTube series I started six years ago, called Cheat Day and Chess. The idea was I would analyze chess while eating desserts. I chose the title because of the alliteration, the shock value and the donuts. I stopped because it was too silly: I realized the title could be misinterpreted as trivializing the harms of cheating.
Do you recognize this position?6
But maybe Cheat Day and Chess was prophetic. When it comes to guilty pleasures like enjoying dessert or scandalous tales, a little sugar with your nutritious calories won’t do much damage, but what happens when dessert is your dinner, lunch and breakfast7?
In the case of cheating and chess, some drama can make the game more popular. But if we keep giving into temptation, and boosting the same sordid tales, Cheat Day and Chess may turn into the end of it all: Cheat Minute and Chess.
We had six such events, with Brazilian poker pro Felipe Mojave winning an edition in New Jersey. Other participants through the series included poker pros Kevin Martin (who got heads-up with Felipe) and Barry Greenstein. Chess players included FM Alisa Melekhina, GM Laurent Fressinet, IM Greg Shahade, GM Simon Williams—-even GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
The Scheinberg family has since sold his shares to General Atlantic.
See The Stealth Campaign That’s Getting Your Kids Hooked on Chess https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/science/chess-games-adolescents.html
The joke started on the Chessbrahs channel. See my earlier substack piece for more thoughts on cheating and chess.
Hans admitted cheating online twice. WSJ / chess com posted their findings https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-report-magnus-carlsen-11664911524 and the parties settled in August 2023 in a joint statement.
It’s the famous Saveedra position (White to Move and Win), which I covered in my second and last episode of Cheat and Day and Chess.
Dylan McClain for the NYT, or the just completed Clash of the Claims.
This was an excellent article!