Who Owns Chess.com?

The chess.com domain was registered in 1995 by Aficionado, a Berkeley company that used it to sell a tutoring program called Chess Mentor. In 2005, Erik Allebest and Jay Severson, friends who had met at Brigham Young University, bought the domain and began building a general-purpose online chess platform. Allebest has described funding the early work with personal savings and long hours.

The site relaunched in 2007 with social features, turn-based and live games, and free access. Growth was steady through the 2010s as the platform added lessons, puzzles, tactics trainers, and a mobile app, converting a fraction of free users to paid subscriptions.

Several events turned Chess.com into a mainstream business. The 2020 pandemic lockdowns produced a surge in online chess, followed later that year by a second wave driven by the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit. Daily games played jumped dramatically, and the platform's paid subscriber base grew sharply.

The company expanded into esports and content. Its Chess.com Global Championship and events such as PogChamps, featuring streamers rather than grandmasters, drew large Twitch audiences and brought in sponsors. It signed top creators and built a broadcast operation around its coverage.

In December 2022 Chess.com acquired Play Magnus Group, the Oslo-listed company built around Magnus Carlsen's brand, in a deal worth roughly $83 million. The acquisition consolidated most of the serious online chess market under one roof, adding chess24's broadcast platform and the Play Magnus training apps. Membership passed 100 million in 2022, 200 million in April 2025, and approximately 243 million by the end of 2025, with around 8.7 million daily active users and about 2.5 billion games played in the fourth quarter alone.