Chess.com grew so big that one game number overflowed its software
In June 2017 someone on Chess.com started game number 2,147,483,647, the largest value a common 32-bit integer can hold, and the app stopped working. It was a strange milestone for a site bought as a bare domain name in 2005 that now claims hundreds of millions of members.
The address was first registered in 1995 by Aficionado, a Berkeley company selling a tutoring program called Chess Mentor. In 2005 Erik Allebest and Jarom Severson, who had met as students at Brigham Young University, bought the domain, and Aficionado moved its product elsewhere. The pair hired developers to turn the site into a chess portal, relaunching it in 2007. Growth came partly by purchase: the social site chesspark.com two years later, and in 2013 the Amsterdam news site chessvibes.com, run by journalist Peter Doggers.
The scale is striking. By 2014 more than a billion live games had been played. Membership reached 250 million around February 2026 and 268.6 million by July 2026, and the site reported about 11 million daily active users in April 2023. It runs on a freemium model, offering daily, rapid, blitz and bullet games, variants such as crazyhouse, chess960 and bughouse, puzzles, lessons, and a sister site, ChessKid.com, aimed at players under 13.
Engines matter to the business. In 2018 Chess.com bought Komodo, then rated above 3300 and third behind Stockfish and Houdini. Its own closed-source engine, Torch, built by authors of several open-source engines, has repeatedly finished second to Stockfish in the site's computer championships, and in 2024 its developers shifted focus from raw strength to making it a tool for users.
The company has also become a major tournament organiser and broadcaster. It won rights to stream the 2021 World Championship on Twitch, has run the Speed Chess Championship every year since 2016, where Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura have each taken five titles, and launched a Global Championship in 2022 that Wesley So won. That same year it bought the Play Magnus Group, owner of chess24 and Chessable, for about 80 million dollars.
Source: Chess.com
