The History of chess.com

The domain Chess.com was originally set up in 1995 by Aficionado, a company based in Berkeley, California, to sell a piece of chess tutoring software called "Chess Mentor".Then, in 2005, Internet entrepreneur Erik Allebest and partner Jarom ("Jay") Severson, who met as undergraduate students at Brigham Young University, bought the domain name and assembled a team of software developers, redeveloping the site as a chess portal. The site was then relaunched in 2007 with heavy campaigning and promotion on social media.

Two years later, Chess.com acquired a similar chess social networking site, chesspark.com.In October 2013, Chess.com acquired the Amsterdam-based chess news site chessvibes.com as well. This news site, founded and operated by Dutch chess journalist Peter Doggers, continued to cover chess tournaments in a digital setting.

Growth in the 2010sEdit
The website reached a milestone in 2014, when it announced that over a billion live games had been played on the site, including 100 million correspondence games.In January 2016, Chess.com announced a two-year overhaul of its previous interface (titled 'v3'). The site introduced new features including computer analysis of games, and the chess variants of crazyhouse, three-check chess, king of the hill, chess960 and bughouse.Chess.com reached another milestone in June 2017, as the 2,147,483,647th (= 231-1) game was played, which caused the iOS app to stop working for those with 32-bit Apple devices. This occurred because of an integer overflow problem whereby the number was too large to be represented in the number of storage bits that were used.