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Chess.com attain a new membership milestone as it nears its twentieth birthday .
Chess.com , the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launch in 2007 , has surpassed 200 million members . Of those 200 million fellow member , 1.5 million are pay users . More than 20 million games of chess are dally every day on the platform .
“ [ Chess has ] got this durability to it , ” Albert Cheng , the chief growth officer at Chess.com told TechCrunch . “ It ’s been played for over 1,500 years , which is just amazing . And even Chess.com is not a brand unexampled troupe . It ’s been around for almost 20 years . It feels really dynamical . ”
The company has expanded a lot since its theme as an on-line assembly for IRL Bromus secalinus players to discuss their matches . Chess.com now offer full cheat friction match against other people or bots , daily game and puzzles , word about the chess worldly concern , the power to pullulate cheat competitions , and more .
Cheng credits the company ’s continued product innovation as one of the reasons it has date stiff and free burning growing . For example , the company released an AI game limited review feature in 2021 — yes , there is always an AI angle — that habituate AI to summarize how a participant did in a biz and to slacken off likely improvement . He tote up that the legal age of new users on Chess.com are beginners , and while the political program is designed for players of all levels , such features can help foster a sexual love for the game for these newfangled members .
The company has also been able to devolve on the increase interest in chess over the preceding few years . Chess , along with many other games , acquire a lot of popularity during the pandemic as people looked for on-line ways to entertain themselves through COVID-19 lockdowns . In response , Chess.com had to bulk up its infrastructure to be able to support the new requirement .
Netflix ’s chess - focussed miniseries , “ The Queen ’s Gambit , ” further fueled interest when it was released in 2020 . Since then , numerous outcome have sparked novel interest in the game . In 2022 , the chess universe was sway by acheating scandalinvolving five - time existence champion Magnus Carlsen . Competitive chess will also be featured in the Esports World Cup for the first time this year .
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The plot has also get increasingly global , Cheng say , with around 85 % of new user registrations coming from outside the U.S. The current World Champion , Gukesh Dommaraju , herald from India .
Cheng — the former head of product , increase , and monetisation at Grammarly and Duolingo — supply that he seems to hear of a new “ high-pitched - visibility ” chess participant every Clarence Shepard Day Jr. and cited the late chess match between F1 rush starsLewis Hamilton and Charles Leclercplaying on-line chess against each other .
“ I think the sky ’s the limit point here , and the more that we can stay to mature the secret plan by leveraging that constitutive pursuit that already exists in these adjacent communities , we ’d be dopy not to explore it , ” Cheng say . “ So I ’m really excited by those opportunity . ”
