Read time: 3 minutes 53 seconds
Chess.com will always have a special place in my heart.
Initially ranked 962, all-time low 825, then the grind began. Never forgetting the day I rekt SimplyLuidi777 and hit 1200 Rapid.
COVID lockdowns.
Queen’s Gambit was the talk of the town.
My housemates and I inhaled the series and started playing.
Then I took it too far - watched hundreds of hours of GothamChess, followed the pro circuit, got hooked playing online, and my housemates stopped finding it fun playing with me.
You’ve got your kooky at-home set
and your magnetic out-of-home set
Obviously I’m not ‘good at chess’ in the scheme of things. Not even scratching the surface. 1 year of playing to only land in the top 8.3% of players on Chess.com.
But it was one of those flash-in-the-pan hobbies that takes you straight into flow-state.
Obsessively learning the skill trees. Studying what makes the greatest players great. Analysing your own strengths and weaknesses to move past improvement bottlenecks - the metagame behind the actual game.
Scratched the same itch as scripting/botting in Runescape, learning the piano, and building Strategy Breakdowns.
Anyway - in my chess era I couldn’t help but notice what a wonderful business Chess.com was. Several tailwinds, and several moats. Iconic domain. Wanted to write about them for a while.
Today we’re doing it. Enjoy.
— Tom
P.S. Add me - username: NewtownGambit ♞
Website work that took weeks, now done in a chat
Ploy's agents do the website jobs that used to wait on an agency or a developer:
PEC360 makes site changes in about 30 seconds, not a week
Clay shipped a skills marketplace in about a month instead of 6
Volca rebuilt its site and saved $20-30K in agency fees
Built by Webflow's founding CTO.
(Strategy Breakdowns readers get 50% off their first month - use code Tom-Alder)
Why did last month's email revenue drop?
A dashboard shows the dip. Finding the cause usually takes an afternoon of exports and pivot tables.
Omnisend connects to ChatGPT and Claude, so you can ask your account why the number fell, then have it adjust the segment or build a re-engagement campaign.
The prompt library adds ready-made checks, from deliverability health to a monthly executive summary. 150,000+ brands use Omnisend, averaging $79 back for every $1 spent.
Thank you for supporting our sponsors, who keep this newsletter free.
Every chess streamer signs this clause
Chess Move
The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy
The best chess player in the world (arguably in history) is the Norwegian legend Magnus Carlsen.
In the last 24 hours, almost 2 Norway’s worth of people signed into Chess.com
8.7 million average daily users (up 17.5% year-over-year) playing 2.5 billion games every 90 days.
By the time you finish this newsletter, 57,078 games will have finished.
But why Chess.com exactly? Chess is a well understood game with simple rules. And in the vibe-coding era anyone can build a chess app in a weekend.
It’s because Chess.com took the 1,500-year-old board game and stacked a series of interesting moats and habit loops.
Here’s how they pulled it off.
💡
Strategy Playbook: Free core, paid progress, borrowed audience.
Breakdown
The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways
1. Chess is the game, habits are the metagame
Anyone can build a chess app.
Free, open-source rivals like Lichess already do most of what Chess.com does, for nothing.
So Chess.com stopped competing on the game, and started competing on the habit.
The same gamification playbook behind most successful gaming apps. Streaks, scores, leaderboards, social mechanics, etc.
Let’s break it down mode by mode:
Puzzle Rush (increasingly hard back-to-back chess puzzles) gives you 3 mistakes before the run ends, turning calculation drills into a leaderboard chase.
Puzzle Battle takes that same premise but makes it head-to-head with other players, multiplying win streaks into points.
The Daily Puzzle has to be solved within 48 hours, or your streak dies.
“Duolingo but for Chess” is the right analogy.
In fact, in November 2023, Chess.com and Duolingo actually partnered - Duolingo’s owl became a playable bot on Chess.com. Official collab between 2 of history’s most effective habit-formation apps.
2. Never paywall the game itself
Human-versus-human play has never been paywalled.
Not once, in any tier.
What is paywalled: unlimited puzzles, full game analysis, an ad-free experience, and coach explanations that tell you why (not just when) you blundered.
Under 1% of the 250 million members pay for anything.
It’s the same logic behind Ahrefs’ generosity engine: give away the thing that hooks people, charge only once they want to go further than the free version can take them.
Want the full analysis?
Try Premium
And almost all of that money now arrives through their mobile app.
In 2016 the Chess.com app made about $56,000 a month.
By 2026 it was making $5.9 million a month, roughly 105x.
More than 90% of app installs are people who went searching for it themselves.
When The Queen’s Gambit hit Netflix in October 2020, app revenue rose 441% in 4 months.
When the Messi-Ronaldo chessboard photo went viral 2 years later, a wave of attention just as big moved revenue 39%.
40+ million likes = hundreds of millions of impressions, just from Ronaldo’s post. Right before the Qatar world cup.
Spot Queens Gambit and the Messi-Ronaldo chessboard photo moment…
3. Outsourcing distribution to streamers
Chess.com’s Partner Streamer Program has been a tremendous growth lever.
Here’s how it works:
The qualification is a relatively low bar - 1,000+ followers + 10+ hours a month of live chess content.
Clear it, and you get featured streams, live-alerts to Chess.com’s user base, and affiliate perks.
The program also equips streamers with tools for their streams and videos - from ad-free game boards to ways to let streamers play their followers.
Watch or even challenge streamers, natively inside the Chess.com app. Maybe even sign up for a 0.9%pa personal loan while you’re at it.
Buried in the terms is the critical moat for every participant - exclusivity to Chess.com
Checkmate.
This exclusive creator ecosystem unlocks phenomenal distribution for Chess.com:
PogChamps - a tournament of celebrities (Mr Beast, Ludwig, Pokimane, Ebere Eze, Rainn Wilson aka Dwight Schrute, Logic) - pulled 375,110 concurrent viewers, more than nearly every actual Grandmaster tournament.
Chess.com Global Championship - a $1,000,000 prize fund with $200,000 to the winner, and the open qualifiers were free to enter for any member who had played 50 rated blitz or 20 rated rapid games.
Esports World Cup - Chess.com signed a 2-year deal with the Esports World Cup Foundation to put chess into the tournament. The debut carried a $1.5M prize pool, and peaked at 259,000 concurrent viewers.
Wild takeaway from all this: Active users growing from 1.3m to 3.4m in the 4 years before Queens Gambit. Pretty much entirely driven by creators.
Rabbit Hole
The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more
[5 min read]
8.7 million average daily users. 2.5 billion games played. 13.5 million new accounts. All in a single quarter.
Chess.com is not publicly traded, but the level of reporting transparency is next level.
Here are the actual numbers behind every stat in this piece, and more, straight from the source.
[21 min read]
Naavik got Chess.com’s CEO on the record, then put 10 years of app revenue next to it.
→ Why Puzzle Rush lifted average spend per player by 58%
→ Why The Queen’s Gambit was worth more than 10x the Messi-Ronaldo photo
→ What changed in 2023 that stopped Chess.com needing viral moments at all
Published just 2mo ago, and one of the best dives into the Chess.com product strategy we found
[∞ min play]
Check out the platform for yourself.
They have a pretty slick onboarding flow for players of all levels.
Spent too much time in here in 2021 (and while writing this piece) to not mention it.
Before you go, 2 things that might help your business:
One inbox for all your DMs: Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, LinkedIn and X, with more coming soon. The Mac app that prioritises your chats, hides the noise, and drafts replies in your voice.
Put your business in front of the founders and tech leaders who read strategy for fun and buy tools for work. 150k+ email subscribers, 140k social followers, 2m impressions a month.
