The Rise of Chess.com

I never had a farm in Africa, but I once wrote a page titled The Rise of Internet Chess (m-w.com), subtitled 'The Internet -- meaning technologies that link networks together -- has been very good to chess', dated May 2007. A few years after I wrote the page, another chess fan asked if I could update it.

I thought about the request a little bit -- which is as much as I think about anything -- and realized that a follow-up to the page would necessarily be titled 'The Rise of Chess.com'. Why necessarily? Partly because the site started around the same time as my 'Internet Chess' page ended and partly because the site has defined online chess since it first appeared.

Any history of Chess.com would be a big undertaking and I'm glad I never took the idea seriously. Here's a recent video that does the job as well as I can imagine.

The History of Chess.com | Celebrating 100 Million Members! (1:25:25) • '[Published on] Dec 16, 2022'

The description says,

Chess.com is celebrating 100 million members! In recognition of this milestone, we collected questions from the community across social media, and our CEO Erik Allebest and CCO Danny Rensch answered as many as they could in a deep dive on the full history of Chess.com!

At the same time I noted that video, I noted two other videos that complement it. Here are links to all three, including the Youtube channels where they reside.

• 2022-12-16: The History Of Chess.com | Celebrating 100 Million Members! (Chess.com)
• 2022-12-21: State Of Chess.com 2022 | ft. Danny, Magnus, and Our Announcements For 2023! (Chess24); starts with 'Chess.com Acquisition of Play Magnus Group [PMG]'
• 2022-12-22: What Is It Like To Work At Chess.com? (Chess.com)

Congratulations to CEO Erik and CCO Danny on a fantastic achievement. A few months into its existence I remember seeing that Chess.com had reached 300.000 members. At the time I thought that must be some kind of an upper bound. Who could have known?