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How Chess.com Co-Founder Danny Rensch Turned a Centuries-Old Game Into a Media Empire

After a childhood in an Arizona collective, Rensch helped build Chess.com into the dominant platform of chess’s digital era.

At Web Summit Vancouver last month, Danny Rensch, co-founder and chief chess officer of Chess.com, asked the audience for a show of hands: Who had seen Untold: Chess Mates, the Netflix documentary about the 2022 Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal that rocked the professional chess world? Rensch, who was featured prominently in the film, has become one of the most visible figures in chess as the game’s biggest online platform has expanded into media, subscriptions and brand partnerships.

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Rensch’s route to co-founding Chess.com was unusual. In 2005, internet entrepreneurs Erik Allebest and Jay Severson bought the Chess.com domain at a bankruptcy auction for their fledgling online chess business. But the company that exists today took shape later, after Rensch joined in 2008 and pushed for a bigger vision involving live video play, coaching and community. “They had a vision for it to be the MySpace of Chess, a smaller vision with many domain names. But I was like, no, no, no, this is the beginning of the future. Chess was made for the digital age, and it’s coming online,” he told Observer on........

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