Chess.com Reaches 100 Million Members!

Chess.com has come quite a long way in our more than 15 years of existence, and nothing proves it more than you—the members. As of today, we number more than 100 million! From our early days until now, it has been quite a journey.

Chess.com CEO, Erik Allebest, shared his thoughts on hitting 100,000,000 members:
"Frankly, I’m shocked. In 100 million versions of the multiverse, in none of them would I have anticipated seeing 100 million registered members on Chess.com. And yet, here we are. It blows my mind. The confluence of events that have happened to get us here is truly extraordinary. I’m grateful to the chess community for their trust and support as we steward the game to even greater heights. As a fan, I can’t wait for the events, content, and products coming out in the near future. Chess is the greatest game on earth, and hitting this milestone of members is a great reminder of just how great the king of games truly is."

Chess is the greatest game on earth, and hitting this milestone of members is a great reminder of just how great the king of games truly is.
— Erik

To celebrate our journey to 100 million members, we asked the community to send us questions about the development of Chess.com, and we recorded a video on "The History Of Chess.com" with Erik and Danny Rensch who answered questions like: "When was the first time someone cheated on Chess.com?" or "Why the green pawn?"

The number 100,000,000 is pretty darn big. That's a one with eight zeros after it. If we were all one country, Chess.com would have the 15th-highest population in the entire world.

We reached 100 million live during the Speed Chess Championship Semifinal match between Magnus Carlsen and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and had a great celebration with our viewers as Robert Hess was joined live by some special guests.

We want to thank you in our community for playing, loving, and sharing chess daily. On to 200 million!

How did we get here? Let's take a look back at several major membership milestones that you helped us to achieve.

In 2007, we got this review from TechCrunch.com. The next year we welcomed our first paid subscribers. Some of them are still premium members and regulars at the site, among them @frank713 and @sonofpearl! 

In 2010, we welcomed our 1,000,000th member. In comparison to now, a million may not seem like much. But it was a huge deal for us!

After hitting 10,000,000 in 2014, our number had increased to 20,000,000 by 2017. We continued to grow and by the time of the first PogChamps in June 2020, there were 35 million of us.

That number doubled in little more than a year, thanks in large part to more people trying chess during lockdowns or thanks to PogChamps or The Queen's Gambit. Yes, more of you joined in 18 months than joined in all of our first 13 years.

All in all, our journey looks like this:

And now here we stand, nine figures strong, still pushing forward. Thanks to each and every one of you—we look forward to growing chess even more in the years to come!

When and why did you join Chess.com? Tell us your story in the comments!