No Priors · Thursday, August 13, 2026
Erik Allebest discussed the significant growth periods for Chess.com, noting a major surge after the Netflix show 'The Queen's Gambit' and another wave in 2023 due to increased school play driven by short-form content and a cheating scandal. He mentioned that the platform's growth has remained high and compounding.
“But then when Covid and Queen's Gambit happened, some news cycles happened, and we're like, oh, this might just be a flash in the pan like treadmills and sourdough bread. Um, and then, you know, we we're going to just kind of come back down to where we were. But we actually stayed really high after that.”
“Um, but then in 2023, we had another crazy wave where all these kids started playing in schools because of short form content and the mittens bought and the cheating scandal. And then we just spiked again, and then when we came down again, we were so much higher and we maintained this baseline.”
“And so, kind of in 2024, like, oh my gosh, like this thing is actually sticking around. It's actually growing and compounding over time. Um, so this is a lot bigger than we thought it was going to be.”