At the Web Summit in Vancouver last month, Danny Rensch, co-founder and chief chess officer of Chess.com, asked the audience for a show of hands: Who’s watching? Unspeakable: Chess Companionsthe Netflix documentary about Carlsen Niemann cheating scandal 2022 That shook the world of professional chess? Wrench, who features prominently in the film, has become one of the most visible figures in chess as the game’s largest online platform has expanded to include media, subscriptions and brand partnerships.
Wrench’s path to co-founding Chess.com was unusual. In 2005, Internet entrepreneurs Eric Alipst and Jay Severson purchased the Chess.com domain at a bankruptcy auction for their fledgling online chess business. But the company that exists today took shape later, after Wrench joined in 2008, and pushed toward a larger vision that included live video, training, and community. “They had a vision for it to be a MySpace for chess, a smaller vision with a lot of domain names. But I said, no, no, no, this is the beginning of the future. Chess was created for the digital age, and it’s available online,” he told the Observer on the sidelines of the Web Summit.
Today, Chess.com says it has more than 250 million members and generates annual revenue of about $150 million. It hosts more than 10 million chess games daily, and its business now extends beyond gameplay to training, events, creator content, and advertising.
This expansion has helped make Rench a recurring character in chess media this year. next to Unspeakable: Chess Companionsthe documentary series Senior gentlemenwhich also features Wrench, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. The three-episode series follows modern chess through the lens of Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen as he attempts to launch a new chess league.
“The story initially focused on the players, but I realized that a lot of the drama was happening outside of them.” Senior gentlemen Director Liz Mandelop told the Observer. “Danny has an amazing story. It was almost crazy not to include it.”
Last year, Wrench published Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Lifea memoir that traces how chess shaped his life before and after his formative years in the dominant Arizona group. The book provides important context for how that experience shaped his worldview and the company he built.
Rench grew up in a small, financially integrated group in rural Arizona called the Church of Immortal Consciousness, which was run by trance medium Trina Camp and her husband, Steven. He found chess at nine after watching Searching for Bobby FischerAnd progress quickly. By the age of twelve, chess was declared his divine calling, and he became increasingly estranged from his mother as the group took over more of his life.
There’s even a chapter on Dark squares Titled “The Work of Cults,” it is meant to be read with some irony. The goal is that people can do extraordinary things when they unite around a common goal.
Wrench is cautious with this term. “Cults work. Until they don’t,” he writes, and his line about where healthy group energy becomes dangerous is simple. “The moment he tells you he’s the only one who has all the answers, that’s the moment he turns into a cult,” he said.
The Internet boom of the mid-2000s helped take him out of this world. Bored and bedridden while recovering from extensive surgeries to repair lost hearing after years of medical neglect living in the shadow of the cult, Wrench taught himself search engines and SEO. From there, he came to see chess as a product naturally suited to the digital age.
Wrench helped Chess.com Ride the internet’s waves from live streaming to social media to artificial intelligence. In the years before the pandemic, the company invested heavily in courting top creators and influencers, as well as in live gameplay and cheat detection systems. As a result, when lockdowns began around the world, TV shows like Netflix emerged The Queen’s Gambit Popular chess game for fans, traffic and subscriptions rose. “Chess.com “It accounted for probably 95% of the growth of the chess community,” during that period, Wrench wrote dark squares, There was no landing.
The company’s recurring revenue business combines utilities and entertainment, using subscriptions to fund features that help players improve while creating enough content and community to keep them engaged. Most of its revenue comes from its nearly 2 million subscribers across three tiers, more than half on the $119-a-year Diamond plan. Advertising still makes up a relatively small share of the business, but the company is working to expand direct ad sales as it looks to attract premium and luxury brands.
Unlike traditional media companies that “gamble” on expensive intellectual property and hope subscribers follow, Chess.com has built storytelling on top of an already profitable product, Wrench said. Its media arm, including YouTube and Twitch programming and a creator network, grew out of an ecosystem of players who were already paying for the game. This gives the company a built-in audience and a business model based on usage rather than speculation.
Wrench sees this structure as one of the reasons Chess.com remains relevant to its users in a way his childhood group never did. “I feel very grateful that we couldn’t even let money rule it if we wanted to, because the community owns the game,” he said.
His broader point is that communities can act as a check on institutions when they have real agency. In chess, players, creators, and fans can move freely across platforms, holding Chess.com accountable in a way that many companies don’t.
Given that IBM Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a match 30 years ago, what business lessons does the world of chess have for the rest of us today? “We live in a world where more people are playing chess than ever before,” he told the Web Summit audience. “Humans still value the journey more than the destination. There are reasons why you can be more efficient and productive, but chess has shown that the process of learning and failing as you strive for perfection, knowing you will never reach it, is not just BS. Otherwise chess would die.”
