Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] Do you think what you've done with chess. com is transferable to any other sort of traditional game?
Erik Allebest: It's a great question. We've thought about this, everyone's always Oh, if you did chess now go do checkers and backgammon and go and all these things.
And it's chess has its own unique culture. That's very. Old than it existed to build on and change. And the content is interesting and the storylines and the players. I think this
Nate Kadlac: welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. All right. We just wrapped up an interview with Eric Albest, who is the co founder and CEO of Chess. com, which I mean, Five to 10 million daily players closing in on I believe 100 million in [00:01:00] revenue every year.
it's just, and it's bootstrapped, which is why it's so good, such a, great story.
Joseph Rueter: 500 humans. Working to make chess accessible and fun gave us a little bit of a heads up on product and things that are coming up. Some things that stuck out to me was his conversation about community, media, and product needing to mix.
I don't know that there's a lot of specifics there. I think there's content inside this one to help any gamer, game builder, think about how to mix those three. So look forward to that feedback. What stuck out to you, Nate?
Nate Kadlac: It all started with a logo. Oh. And you know what? I just love that as a bootstrap company, like you just don't see that sort of investment of, design thinking that early on.
And so most people tell you it's a waste of time and sometimes it is, but, in his case, he wanted to set the vibe and the experience and, and, choosing a pond and the logo set the stage for how they are going to approach communicating with their [00:02:00] community and building product and, all of that, that it was going to be for everybody.
So really excited for this interview. I hope you enjoy it. Let's go to the pod.
I'm Nate Kadlack and I'm here with my co host Joseph Reuter and today we are so excited to speak with Eric Alabest, the co founder and CEO of chess. com. I'm extremely excited for this interview. Eric is a well known entrepreneur and a longtime proponent and fan of chess. Even during his college and postgraduate years, he has already been in.
Business Ventures, most notably, his founding of Schoolhouse Chess, Wholesale Chess, and of course, Chess. com. Chess. com is one of the most, if not the best, online chess platforms available online, reaching approximately 11 million daily users. I think that's right.
Erik Allebest: We're on there.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, great. Filled with a wide range of features such as built in lessons, courses, puzzles, AI opponents, community functions, an internal rating system, and a lot more.
Chess. com stands out as the ideal online chess [00:03:00] platform for newcomers and veterans, and I've been playing there way too much. Eric, we're thrilled you're here.
Erik Allebest: Thank you so much for having me. When hearing that read out, this is my third chess business. And I know not many people on the planet can say that.
I don't know how I got down that rabbit hole. I do love chess a lot. I've spent my kind of my whole career doing that. Dabbled in a couple of other things with limited success there and have really just focused on chess. I do love it. I think 11 million was probably our peak right in 2023.
Everything went crazy. We've had a very interesting ride as a company. And in gaming actually understands this more. I think traditional businesses, they're Oh, we can have this great growth. But gaming's Oh, our game surged. So gaming understands this a little better. We had massive surge in 20, 2020, 2021, 2022 was a quiet down year.
And we were like, Oh, we peaked, chess peaked. But then 2023 was the actual peak. It was a massive wave. [00:04:00] And now in 2024, we're seeing that plateauing. And we're hoping all of our fingers and toes cross that 2025 is gonna be another amazing peak. Because the media side that's coming with, there's like books coming and movies coming and Netflix specials.
We're hoping it reignites people's interest in chess again. Thank you so much again for having me. Love to talk about any of these topics.
Nate Kadlac: So I want to get into some of that very quickly, but we usually kick things off with what's your favorite game to play these days?
Erik Allebest: It is very hard to choose. I'm going to say Valheim, because my son and I are deeply into the Ashlands and having a great time there.
Followed closely by Helldivers 2, which my son and I also play a lot. So those are the two games my son and I bond over the most. In my private time, I play a lot of chess and I play a lot of a game called Landover, which is similar to Settlers of Catan, but in my view, much better. Anyway, those are my games of choice these days.
Joseph Rueter: It's fantastic. Their [00:05:00] strategy games, huh? All of them. If you're going to string those together, how do they connect? They're actually not
Erik Allebest: like Valheim is actually more of like a resource grind. I call it Minecraft for like adults. I also love Minecraft, but it's a little bit like next level Minecraft, so it scratches that itch.
But I grew up playing first person shooters, so I love Helldivers. I love the stress of an extraction where all the bots and bugs are coming at you. So they actually don't tie together. Landover is a calm strategy game. And then chess is not calm for me. Chess is not calm. So I'm all over the map.
Nate Kadlac: I love it.
So in two days, I'm about to get together with a bunch of friends and we always play Catan. Why should I pitch Landover instead?
Erik Allebest: If you're going to play in person, Catan over the board is awesome. I think cities and knights and seafarers expansion stuff make the game more interesting. The reason Landover is just straight up a better game is it takes so much of the mess out of the [00:06:00] game, automates a ton of the mechanics of, you don't have to do all the weird trading stuff, it just speeds up the game, takes all the unnecessary stuff out, has way more variety in maps, better balancing.
But then preserves that gameplay of, the five resources and the going and the ports, but it's, so it's slightly more complicated in its strategy and its maps, but reduced like friction. So that's my pitch. Sorry, disclaimer, this game was created by Jay. Who was the co founder of chess. com with me.
He no longer works at chess. com, but this is his passion. I am an investor, but I'm not pitching. This is literally the most used app on my phone at times,
Joseph Rueter: but I can't wait to play. It's very good. That's all I'm going to say. that's similar to conversations I've had with Nate, where he's I just can't stop playing chess.
I have an addiction. I'm stuck. It's bad. You gotta help me
Nate Kadlac: out. One minute blitz chess games. I like sometimes have to delete the app from my phone because I'm just [00:07:00] going at it way too much.
Erik Allebest: I'm a one plus one player, meaning I like the one second increment. I've been trying to understand the psychology of chess.
There are people who get in there, they download the app. And they like dabble with the bots. They have a slow relationship and they're like, Oh, this is interesting. I'll let me take back the move. And they that slow bot play. That's great because it's like low stress, low stakes. Some of those people hit the play versus another person.
Now there's a clock. Now there's another human. They're like, Oh, I'm measuring against another human, not a machine. Cannot handle that stress. And some people don't like it. So they either go back to bots or they quit chess entirely. But then other people who are like, Ooh, I like this. They like the mano a mano about it.
They like the perfect information. They like that. They know that their opponent doesn't have a better deck stacked with better cards that they paid for. That's going to beat them. It's very straight [00:08:00] up. And what I've realized is that the losses in chess hurt many people so much more than losses and other things.
The wins in chess are so much more rewarding than the wins in other games. And so there is something about chess that gets you coming back because that feel of oh, I made that one discreet awesome move is different from other games where you don't have that discreet knockout blow or that great thing.
So there's something about the equality of chess, the discreteness of chess and the satisfaction of knowing you went just straight up against another person and came out on top. It's rewarding. And maybe that's part of why you've got three of these now. the chess business is another whole story. But the difference is, so example, again, talking about Landover, I love Landover.
When I lose Landover, the dice weren't in my favor. When I win Landover, [00:09:00] I'm a genius. You know what I mean? Like get to have a, both ways. So it feels good all the time. but chess. That sting it gives you, the sting of the loss is actually a motivator for people to come back. So it's a very weird relationship people have with the game.
Nate Kadlac: How did games come into your life as a kid? What about chess or any other thing and growing up in your family, like what were you around them a lot? Did you play them as a family? But where did this all start?
Erik Allebest: Yeah. As a kid growing up, we had a lot of games around. We played games.
We were a fun kind of. gaming family. My mom taught me when I was eight how to play chess. her mom lures that I won the first game and we never played again, but I did play a little bit with friends or different things, but we always had games around with friends. I was playing a lot of games.
I don't know if you ever played Axis and Allies. It's a board game. Takes oh, 12 hours. I loved that. so I've always been a hardcore gamer. And so there's something about gaming. There's [00:10:00] something about strategy. I really love strategy and tactics. Grew up playing paintball a lot, which is, now you're one of the characters in the game.
I'm just a gamer at heart.
Nate Kadlac: So I got into chess much more at my first kind of J O B and we purchased a chess board from WholesaleChess. com and it basically sat in the work cafeteria and we would all over lunchtime go play chess. And so I learned with friends there. And, one, one thing that I've thought about is you started chess.
com after that. What was it about wholesale chess. com that you didn't think to maybe build this community and game through that business? what, about that business made you leave it and then want to start something new? And I know this was all before business school, but yeah, I'm just so curious about what burned you out on that particular business.
Erik Allebest: It's a good question. So chess. com actually did start because of wholesale chess. The idea it was to create a community [00:11:00] and lower customer acquisition costs so we could have a more profitable e commerce business. E commerce is hard, margins shrink, competitive bidding, customer acquisition costs. It's all very challenging.
And the other thing is the reason I might've done it altogether, but It was a weirder different ownership structure, how we started with it. So it couldn't all be in one entity, but I thought chess. com would feed and improve the wholesale chess business, but they would be separate entities with different ownership structures and investments.
The real problem was that I just got bored in e commerce. E commerce was not a fun game for me. E commerce was like a spreadsheet, which is, I know there's a spreadsheet world championship, but it's not my jam. It's not a game to me. That was just like, ah, your customer acquisition costs minus your margin, plus some operations, sell this.
Oh, my competitor's doing this. Oh, It's hard. I think branded e commerce is interesting, but we were [00:12:00] non branded. We were commoditized e commerce, super tough. You're just competing against everyone else selling very similar products or same products. Now you're just competing on price and customer acquisition.
Not a fun game. You're not set up to win that. Brand is different because building a brand and a feel and a relationship or innovating on a new product, that stuff's all fun. But frankly, e commerce got boring for me. I would like my favorite part of the day when I worked at Wholesale Chess. was frankly just cleaning the warehouse at the end.
Cause I also love cleaning, but everything else about it was boring. I didn't enjoy it. And I was like, I got to go do something different. So I applied to business school. I have no idea how actually I do know how I think my wife got me into business school. She's a better writer than I am. She really worked on my essays with me.
She was actually the one motivating and pushing me. And so she really nudged me and helped me get into business school. And then she then realized, wait, I'm not the one going to business school. So she later went to Stanford and got her master's as well. But she got me in to push me to do [00:13:00] something different.
And I really got pushed out of my comfort zone at business school. And gaming was always in the back of my mind, but I thought I would go do things. I. I looked at maybe electronic arts or YouTube was, there, was there a gaming angle? So I looked at a lot of different possibilities, but, ultimately just decided to go my own way and turn down job offers at Facebook and Google and some other places.
But what's so fascinating to me is the full circle of gaming that for a while gaming was hot for different reasons, and then it went cold, but it's come back ever since. Netflix is now a gaming platform, YouTube's a gaming platform, Facebook wants to be a gaming platform. LinkedIn. LinkedIn reached out to us and they're like, Hey, games on LinkedIn.
Everybody understands the power of games. And so it's just very interesting to see the evolution of how content and gaming sits so close to each other. It's just fascinating. But content companies don't understand gaming because it's a different DNA of what [00:14:00] it takes to create a game and how to build a game.
But gaming companies oftentimes don't understand the content world and what it takes to build content and community in those pieces. And so it's very interesting to see that and chess. com we've really tried to be all of these things. A community, a content production house, a gaming development place, and it's made us into a kind of interesting hybrid company.
Nate Kadlac: Are those equal parts in your mind? If you're looking at it, your business as a pie chart, is it each a third or do you feel like one is. More than the other content is a pretty big part of your company right now.
Erik Allebest: It's a big part of our company. It's part of our customer acquisition strategies like social media and all the media elements that drive top of funnel.
But the truth is that all that media stuff can bring people in, but still the funnel of like SEO and [00:15:00] people searching for chess is really what gets more people to the site and the app. And then. The media can help engage and retain the percentage of people who play chess on a given daily basis versus consume the content.
The content is much smaller, but it's a very rabid and like tight group. And More people just play chess, but the people who consume the content are some of the most hardcore users. So you have to serve everybody. So I wouldn't say, pie charts, third. And frankly, serving the community is mostly through product and content anyway.
We serve the community by doing both of those things, but we definitely have more resources and the product and engineering side than we do on the content side. And the other thing is content doesn't pay this, is no revenue essentially. And only gaming drives the revenue. So it makes for an interesting, balance of pieces on the board.
Nate Kadlac: One [00:16:00] thing that stands out to me about chess. com is I read this article recently that you wrote, it all started with a logo. And I'm curious. Design has, when you think back to maybe when you started, I know the game wasn't in place yet, but you had Lee chess. You had another player. I can't remember. What was the other competitor?
ICC. ICC. So when I think back at those times, it was just really hard to play. the design, the user experience is just really tough on a lot of those. It was really geared towards more experienced chess players and you started with the logo and I'm curious about your philosophy on design and branding and how that's played a role in finding maybe a way to differentiate your product and your site from everybody else.
What was going through your mind at that time? It's,
Erik Allebest: I appreciate you teeing that up. It was such a fascinating world because I don't know the same today, but when, 18 years ago, if you Google's image searched for, [00:17:00] chess company or chess logo, kings and knights, it was like all the power pieces.
And we were like, we want to do things a little different. We want chess for everybody. We want chess, the democratized version where it's different. And so we chose the pawn because the pawn is, the most common, it also has potential and you don't know. And, but it was really a differentiator for us.
And it felt a little risky at the time. Where some people were like, dude, don't do the pawn. That's so weak. do the, you want to be the king or you want to be the knight? it turns out we were right on this because I think one of the major things that we did to generationally change the perception of chess was to change the definition of who is a chess player.
And in the past, it was like, if you are a highly rated man from these countries, and then you are a chess player and everyone else is like a pot sir, there was [00:18:00] like a dead denigrating kind of ah, tongue in cheek. But you're not really a chess player. You're this other thing. But we said, no.
Like over time, our message has been everybody's a chess player. I'm a chess player at 16 to 1800. You're a chess player, whatever you are. Women are chess players. People of color are chess players. People just learning the game are chess players. Kids are chess players. Everybody. Just erase the definition.
And not only that. okay, great. It's easy to say that. But if the mentality is still, you're measured on how good you are. then, but you're like, Hey, everybody can be a chess player. you're really only a chess player as good as you play that self select and it keeps people out. So we said, that's not true.
And so in our social media and stuff, instead of celebrating only the best moves and this stuff, we celebrated the moves we all make, which are the blunders and the mistakes and the [00:19:00] heartbreak and the learning and the. And we celebrated all the different levels of experience of chess. And when we did that, it changed definitionally who could become a chess player.
And after a generation of doing this, we're now 18 years in. And so over a period of take as many years as you want last 10 years, five years, When I grew up, chess was for nerds. Nobody thinks that anymore. When I grew up, chess was for boys. Nobody thinks that's anymore, even though it is still skewed that way, but there's not the gatekeeping that there used to be.
And so it's just fascinating that we changed the definition of who is a chess player. And by doing that, vastly expanded the market. And we have much more to do in this area as well. So we're not done yet. Yeah. How much bigger do you think the total addressable market was? like functionally infinite.
It's a great question. There's been reports like, ah, 600 million people know how to play chess. They know the rules or have played chess or there's a large [00:20:00] number. We're not even at the scale yet of everybody who knows how to play chess. in terms of our business and our platform, let alone all the people who will eventually want to learn or all those other things, because it's, again, it's generationally changing when Netflix did the queen's gambit and all these, what we saw was people in their kind of later twenties, up through forties, who watch a lot of Netflix and were inspired by the show.
they're now teaching their kids. And they're teaching them in a different way to enjoy it. And it's not all the pressure of you have to be a champion or, stop playing. They're teaching it differently. And then their kids will teach their kids. So there are billions of possible chess players on the planet.
And I think it will grow to that because. It's just this game that also just doesn't change and it is so accessible. And once you learn it, you can have a relationship with the game at any level throughout your whole life. Whereas other games, they push you to being hardcore, and they're [00:21:00] like, Oh, it's our whales or it's our hardcore audience.
And The learning curve is hard. They're always changing the rules of the game. Like you stop playing Hearthstone for six months and you come back and you don't even know the new cards. And but chess will never change and it will be there forever. And so you can play it for three months and then you can stop playing for three years and then you can go back and play for three months.
So there's going to be more people with relationships to the games, and the game is going to get easy to find an opponent, and will get easier to get better at and enjoy, and people might become fans of the game outside of just playing it. My kids don't play chess. But they like the stories and the heroes and the memes and the different cultural elements.
So there's more to the game than just the boards. So that's why I think like we have a lot of growth ahead of us.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. And it's not necessarily that I have to learn to play the game and you've made. Really solid and simple design choices. It's approachable, it's green [00:22:00] and white instead of black and white.
There's probably like choices there about how you feel in the environment, but you alluded there to what would be streamers, right? The explosion of watching others play for any range of reasons. Must also impact the business, the top of funnel, the people when they come in, and how they play and the features they need.
Talk to us a little bit about what you've seen there
Erik Allebest: that has been one of the most interesting parts of this and how this generationally changed too. Because in, again, in the past, the people that you saw in the media playing chess. were the white guys from these countries. And that was what it was because representation, matters.
And so that's what you saw. You saw the Gary Kasparov's and you saw the Bobby Fisher's and you're like, Oh, those are chess players. Streaming started also before COVID. We had a streamers program and people were doing it. It didn't really explode quite as much until kind of [00:23:00] COVID and that, but. We had streamers coming and people were like on there.
In fact, Twitch was like, Twitch came to us and they're like, Hey, streaming is a really interesting category for us because your users are sticky. They're actually a different demographic than the normal viewers. We really liked your demographic. Let's do a deal together. And we like signed a deal with Twitch and we were like, wow, Twitch is like a big company paying attention to chess.
That's crazy. So then COVID happens. And then all these other gamers that were playing other games, Fortnite streamers, and different people like, XQCs or moist criticals or whatever, they were suddenly they like, we're playing a little bit of chess online. And we're like, Oh, that's, this is interesting.
Non endemic chess streamers who are sport night streamers are playing chess. Let's double click on this one. Like a lot. They taught their audience. Everybody can be a chess player [00:24:00] and that being a bad plus chess player is still a fun chess player. And so everyone was like asking themselves, is it actually more fun to watch low quality chess than high quality chess?
It just might be because they're playing moves that I understand and they're making mistakes that I play. And what we saw was originally the top players. were incensed that like this pog champs event we did of these kind of like very, average low level chess players with getting way more viewership than their, championship kind of things.
And they were, they felt it was disrespectful to the game. And there was like this huge thing in the community. And that was, this, polarizing thing of, do we embrace this or do we shun this? And, different people had different reactions, but we were of course like, this is good.
Put more wood on this fire. And that's what we did. And so that has become a key part of our strategy is engaging with people who aren't the top [00:25:00] player. We do a lot with and for top players. We also do with and a lot for other people who are creators. We just did a deal with Mark Rober. Who like he loves chess, but he's like a YouTube science guy, but he loves chess.
great. We can teach his audience. That chess can be a really great part of their life. And we did a deal with, so we've, we do this and we have a department that works with different celebrities and different influencers and creators because chess is just can apply to everybody and every time.
And so we're just like maximum representation, maximum get, get it out there. And streamers was really what opened the door to this whole strategy.
Joseph Rueter: That's fascinating. And the strategy isn't go and be the best, which is like what you do in baseball, right? I don't know, go watch the pros. What we do in chefs.
Put all the fancy ones on Netflix and then try to emulate them, right? This is the inverse, show them the broken stuff. It is,
Erik Allebest: but it's also the element of [00:26:00] competition doesn't go away. So if you watch like the overtime basketball league, right? It's different. This is like different from the, NBA, but the overtime league has a following because you're still, these are, amateurs, but they have aspirations and they want to play well.
And then you're along for the story and the heartbreak with the NFL players. We did blitz champs, which was like a chess tournament for active NFL players. And these guys are mid level players, but they all want to win. They want to be the best chess player. That's also in the NFL. And so the chess is lower level, there's mistakes and there's different things, but you're watching people try to do their best.
It's not Oh, we want them to be their worst. They want to do their best. We want to watch it, but it is more relatable. And that's the fascinating part.
Joseph Rueter: Wow. Yeah. Especially in an NFL context where, for the receivers and the quarterbacks, they're the. [00:27:00]
Erik Allebest: you just hit on something super, super fascinating, which is one of the impediments of us being able to do more collaborations with celebrities.
Is that they do have an ego about it sometimes and they're so good at something else in their life. They don't want to be on the public stage to not be good at this other thing. So for them, they're like, Hey, I love chess, but I love it privately. And that's just my safe space to be a normal human.
Don't put me on the center stage. And so it's an interesting dynamic for us because we're like, Hey, get out there and, show your chess. And they're like, Oh, this is, I'm not that good. I don't want to be in front of everyone and look vulnerable and all those different things. So we're trying, but it is a challenge.
Joseph Rueter: That's [00:28:00] fascinating. We see this with any kind of expert in different businesses. I've been a part of you like you have the doctor come in who happens to be a surgeon who understands everything about the different tissues in a heart, but really struggles with whatever we're talking about. And they will have different human reactions to that.
Either you ice over or you switch to curiosity. It's like one of those two things is. Is going to happen. And it seems like it's more often the ice over yeah. Is that what you're, referring to? Is it more frequently that an expert in a given field doesn't want to show as a non expert elsewhere?
Erik Allebest: I think so. And I think that, and I understand that no criticisms there, but it's what And so it's just Hey, I don't want to engage, at least with chess, they're like, ah, I don't want to put myself out there and do that. So it's not my thing, which I get. But what was so interesting about streamers is that they understood early that their audiences [00:29:00] connect with their failures almost more than their successes.
And streamers knew that the content isn't, I just bugging destroy everybody, every all the time. It's the highs of the winds and it's the lows. Oh, it's the reaction videos. Ah, I lost. So they know that's what drives it. So all the streamers were like, Hey, I'm already in a vulnerable position showing that I am good and bad at things on the regular.
I'm not in this highly curated thing. So they were way more open, but I think human vulnerability of I want to be seen for my, everything I'm good at and things that I'm not, that's not native, but, streamers were to start, but what's really interesting I think is that media is changing this now.
And you have, because in the past it was like everybody wanted to look their best, very carefully curated press releases and things. But what's changing that is now you got Twitter and people can share their things or now you have in depth behind the scenes shows where you have [00:30:00] these athletes and competitors who want to win so much.
But they're opening up on camera about their fears and their, different things, their vulnerabilities. And, Oh, I didn't get signed to this team or I fell out of this, or I had this. So people are starting to understand that vulnerability, it's eyeballs and it sells. And so more people. are more vulnerable.
They're more willing to do that. So shows like quarterbacks or drive to survive, or, all the other sports and gaming documentaries, hard knocks the currently with the athletes, with the Olympics, Simone Biles, her thing, everyone's Hey, vulnerability is in. So I think that's great.
I think it's good for humanity. I think it's good for content. And I think it's good for everybody and chess. will make you vulnerable because will humble you. It is a relentless game on that. So anyway, these are all very positive signs for all these areas.
Nate Kadlac: Do you think what you've done with chess. com is transferable to any other sort of traditional game?
is there another game that you view [00:31:00] just doesn't have the right community or the right kind of emphasis put into to it in the same way?
Erik Allebest: It's a great question. We've thought about this. everyone's always Oh, if you did chess, now go do checkers and backgammon and go and, all these things.
And it's chess has its own unique culture. That's very. Old than it existed to build on and change. And the content is interesting and the storylines and the players. I think this can be done. I think that things are moving this direction and there's other areas where you're suddenly starting to get a little more interest in that, but it really takes a collaboration of a great product.
With great media and a great community to do that. So you take a game like Scrabble, like who doesn't play Scrabble? I got Scrabble right over here on my thing. So everyone loves Scrabble, but Scrabble didn't figure out content plus community plus product. [00:32:00] Like I read the book Word Freak when I was, in, in college and I was like, Oh, Scrabble is really interesting.
And so that was just a little bit of content, but it never escaped that. And the community is like, the old chess community that hasn't changed yet. And the product was like a board game, which is great. And I love IRL games. I love real chess boards and all that. But the digital product never got great.
In my view, sorry, scopely, but the pieces didn't come together. Could they? I think they could. I think they could, but it would take more willingness on all parties. To elevate that and because Scrabble is an owned brand and they can master control that it makes it hard, but chess is not owned by anybody.
So anybody can enter made the best player win. May the best company, may the best [00:33:00] experience, may the best content win. And that created the competition to let someone rise. We happened to, because we tried, we succeeded there. I think maybe certain games owned by brands. Didn't rise because of control a little bit, maybe over aggressively trying to monetize more than serve the audience.
This is my personal view. I think there are other games out there that classic games that can have a similar Renaissance, but to be honest, chess is the king of the game. So it's not really in our playbook at this time to try to, we got so much more we want to do in chess.
Nate Kadlac: You've talked about in past interviews, a couple of inflection points where things just skyrocketed.
I'm really curious, like when the Queen's Gambit came out, did you have any idea that it was being released? Were you, did you have a heads up like that this could impact your business in the way that it did?
Erik Allebest: I saw one commercial. And I was like, Netflix is doing a chess movie. That's [00:34:00] weird. And then it released and then everything went crazy.
So I was like, literally, that was the entire thought process of how it went. And then our servers are melting. And we're like, absolute chaos for us internally. Exciting chaos. But it was we did not really understand. Netflix didn't reach out to us, even though they learned from us. And they even, Copied some of our design things in the filming, but never gave us credit or anything like that.
Like we have demonstrable, they took our design chess pieces and use them in their show, but we never got credit or we're never done. But then when we made the bots that played like Beth Harmon, the main character and put them on our site, their lawyers were certainly quick to come and tell us, You know, this and we're like, Hey, wait a second, like course they were like, come on, you used our stuff.
Like we promoted you, we did this, you used our, some of our IP, we're not coming after you. And then they're like, [00:35:00] pay us for doing your bots and we're like, pay you for doing the bots. You should pay us for doing the bots. So people will go watch your show anyway. It's just funny dynamics. How that all went down.
Anyway, we have a great relationship with Netflix now and we ended up resolving all of our stuff. But. It was just an interesting thing to be a part of at the time. But that first wave was COVID. Then it was Queen's Gambit. Then it was PogChamps. Again, PogChamps cannot be underestimated how massive that was for us.
And then all of those things made the media write about us. And that was its own self fulfilling cycle. Everyone out there, Oh, chess is getting so popular. Chess is getting so popular. What did that do? Made chess even more popular. So that first wave was just, it's just everything compounding together. And we, the 2020 and 2021 was just an amazing ride through all of that.
And then the decline and we thought, Oh, chess is going to chess, like treadmills and sourdough bread is going to go right [00:36:00] back to where it was pre pandemic, but it didn't.
Nate Kadlac: So,
there's this idea that entertainment sort of feeds, feeds games and, maybe vice versa a little bit, what are your thoughts around, a, I'm curious if chess.
com is planning to do, any movies or anything like that. How do you view entertainment and how people participate in your games and think about that as a package, in a sense.
Erik Allebest: So we produce a lot of content, whether it's, short form media for, shorts or YouTube, we do funny memes and all that stuff.
That's the media. But then we also have events, we produce our own events. We cover different chess events that are already out there. There's constantly someone's trying to start a new chess tournament, whether it's, a freestyle chess or we just did a deal with the global chess league from tech Mahindra in India.
So as people are coming into chess saying, we want to put on events. Great. We'll make the shows out of it. But that's The shows, then there's like the media, but then the entertainment [00:37:00] side. This is where it was interesting because Netflix was fiction. That's how just sorry to spoil it for everyone.
Beth Harmon ain't real. So that was fiction, but it drove interest in the game. We think there's more of that to be done. And so next year we actually know of several projects that are hitting that are going to be on the media entertainment side, which are going to in our view create another wave of interest in chess because it's different from just watching great chess players play or watching some short stuff on YouTube and some memes.
No, this is different. So we know that, There's a Netflix Untold episode coming out that's going to hit kind of the sports and Netflix audience. We know that Ben Mesrich, who is famous for Social Network and Bitcoin Billionaires and the GameStop book and, a bunch of books I read when I was growing up, he's writing a book about chess.
The rights to that were bought by Emma Stone to do a movie, which apparently is [00:38:00] coming out later next year. I also know of several other projects in the works, which are different media series, whether full media series, and those are all being cooked right now. And I think that all of that stuff is going to make current chess players have a better, longer term relationship with the game and is going to bring more new people into the game.
So I'm pretty excited about where media is going to take chess in 2025.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, that's fantastic. It's fantastic for this reason you're continually talking about media. You've brought it up a couple different times as a mix with product and community. Did you approach not only chess but other things with that mix?
When you started, and if not, what have you learned that a person starting like in a casual game space could apply to their, efforts? I think it can be like, I know this is coming, so I'll make a banner [00:39:00] ad. And right. Or I know this is coming. So I'll make two pieces of content for Instagram.
I'll schedule them. I know this is coming. And how do you go around the process of thinking not only strategically that these media properties. The goings on of the stream of consciousness and public view are something that you can attach yourself to and choose to take your resources
Erik Allebest: and invest in them.
Yeah. So you're totally spot on here. I will tell you, I did not think this way. My brain isn't the media brain, brain, my brain was the, it was the gaming brain. But one of our co founders, Danny, his brain is the media brain. He started the streamers program. And it was also his vision a lot to bring media and entertainment to it and to bring it more mainstream even more.
He really thought Hey, get more people watching, change what it means. And some of this whole thing we did kicked off with Danny's idea, which was. [00:40:00] This is so ghetto, like 12 years, I don't know how many years ago, a long time ago, we got two medium level international masters. So Danny and one of his friends, and we had two laptops, the e sports style kind of facing.
So they were facing each other with screens away. And then we put a plate with a thousand dollars in 1 bills in the middle. And it was like, you play for the money. And that was popular. And we're like, people want to watch this. People want to see this. And of course we also did the, here's a tutorial on how to play chess and here's how to use chess.
com. And we did the regular content stuff of the playbook, but then the. The thing with the humans and the cash and the stakes, that is what people were like, we want more of that. And they responded to that. And that was what Danny understood and still continues to understand is the importance of that, that it's not just.
Do a tutorial, do a thing, but it's like create stakes, create cultural [00:41:00] touch points, create how do you hook in to the other things? And you have to get inventive. It's not that easy. You can't just go online anymore and spend 20, 000 to pay a streamer to play your stupid game for an hour and then Oh, that's all you gotta do.
That's just not how it works. There's no easy ins here. There's no easy ends. It has to be authentic. It has to be resonating. It has to have a community. You need to have your discords. You need humor. Helldivers 2 has succeeded as a game from great gameplay, but Incredible zeitgeist humor tone that really captured a lot of what is going on.
And so a community immediately gravitated around that feel. And that has been their successful playbook. So everybody has to figure out what that is. And so you can't just make a high quality game. You can't just make a fun game. You need to make a socially relevant [00:42:00] and interesting and differentiated game, and then work hard to find your hooks into the broader community.
Pieces.
Joseph Rueter: Woo.
Erik Allebest: Seems easy. Let's do
Joseph Rueter: it real easy. Playbook set run. Go do work hard. How big is the team these days? What's their kind of rhythm? We're
Erik Allebest: about 500 people. So good. Yeah. we got a big product and engineering team, we have a big content and media team, support team, in some ways our business is like part duo lingo cause it's like learning and like engagement.
It's part gaming. So we're also a casual game. So we're like casual game, we're candy crush plus duo lingo plus content. And media. And so we try to do all that stuff at once. we have a pretty large team because of that. And the other thing is that our product is super complicated.
Like I've talked to other people at other games. They don't have some of the problems we have. [00:43:00] Cheating is a problem. Matchmaking is a problem. Single global server that serves all the games of everyone is a problem. Skill levels and ratings is a problem. Then you have leaderboards. We also do all the educational content because chess is rife with the excitement is like doing you got puzzles, you got lessons, you got drills, you got game review and do a lingos here whoa, All we have is like a learn path and a leaderboard and like some friends stuff. That's it. We killed our forums like, ah, this. And.
Nate Kadlac: Thousands of push notifications.
Joseph Rueter: An angry, bird of green descent that dresses up in a costume on Insta and acts like a weirdo. Yeah,
Erik Allebest: they are genius on the social. In fact, I was on a call with their CMO this week, just, chatting a little bit and They are so all in on great product and in simple product with engagement and social media.
That is their playbook. It is simple. And I'm I am green with jealousy of how simple their [00:44:00] playbook is. Now congrats to them. They have executed the hell out of this. They are top notch. Their team is amazing. Their product is great. Their social media. We call Duolingo our older brother who went off to college because we just want to be them when we grow up.
So everything about them is awesome, but they really benefit from a level of simplicity that we are jealous of. We have a lot more moving parts on the complexity of the chess game, the chess content, and the chess community altogether. It's hard for us, really, to prioritize and serve. they
Joseph Rueter: might argue with you about the complexity of language, right?
And innuendo and connection UI recently. it's not, they just feed you the same thing you screwed up before. They'll give it to you in a different way. It's Hey, Ooh, how'd you guys do that?
Erik Allebest: No, definitely they're pushing hard. They have to. And in fact, they have all companies, they have to stay relevant and they have to make their product better and better because of all the products out there, that AI and LLMs is going to be coming [00:45:00] after.
Like they're definitely a vulnerable product and their stock price got hit for and other things. Chess is different. I just literally yesterday I had these five questions that I asked each of the major engines, right? Chat GPT and Gemini. And the new one, the reason I did is because new Lama launched and I asked these five chest questions, like what's the best move in this chest position?
What's the best move in this chest position? Explain this chest position to me. And LLMs are so far away from on their recommending illegal moves. They can't see checkmate in one. They're telling you reasons to do stuff that has does not make sense in chess. So anyway, chess is still for now, we use LLMs and AI in our educational stuff.
But we, there's no generalized LLM or, model right now that's going to understand chess to the way our models, which are AI plus human heuristics [00:46:00] plus educational expertise. That is defensible for us. Versus, Duolingo is a little bit different, which is like translate this or ask me some questions here and have a conversation in a language.
So anyway, we're a little off topic on the games, but these are interesting areas to be in for sure.
Nate Kadlac: You've dealt with, millions of people coming at you who probably don't exactly know how to play chess, but they've been intrigued or curiosity has been driven by Netflix series. We talk a lot with indie creators think of like casual games like wordle has really sprung up this economy And so you have all of these simple casual browser based games that people create.
I think one of the things that is Something you do well, but I don't think a lot of people do well is onboarding new users and you've mentioned in the past I believe that first win in chess Helps drive two to three further games or you probably have the better stat on that. But how do you think about onboarding new users to your games?
And what have you done well and what do you need to improve on?
Erik Allebest: Oh man, [00:47:00] honestly, I'm not sure we've done anything well there. We have a long way to go there. It's actually a current focus of ours to make that better. I think we benefit from the fact that Chess is a bit, it's a known game and people can come in and they can choose what they want to do.
And we, we can teach you the rules and do those things. But a lot of people get soft onboarded before chess. com. They get soft onboarded with a friend who pulls out a chess board and teaches you the moves and does certain things. Or, Hey, I'm going to challenge you to a game on chess. com and do it.
So we actually get a fair amount of onboarding softened by the real world. Which is different from another thing where you have to explain the rules that every time you know all these different things So we can do better here and we're going to that where when you say I'm this kind of chess player We're gonna be like wait, we recommend this for you.
We're gonna limit down So there's a lot of things in the works and one of the key products we're working on is Play versus coach so that you don't have to come in and immediately get blasted by some other human and there's a clock, but like a softer touch. So our play [00:48:00] versus coach product, which will be launching this year is much more of a personality, like someone who's on your team trying to teach you while you play.
And that's going to serve a need for people who are like, look, I want to get into chess, but without any of the stress. And we're like, great. playing versus coach is for you and then later on you can ramp up. So there's so much we have to do to make chess more accessible. We've done a lot.
We've made it fun. We've depressurized what it means to be a player, but we can still make our products better. Our game review is our most popular product outside of play because it explains the game to you. It takes the mystery out of it a little bit. It helps you improve. So those are all the areas where we're investing right now.
Joseph Rueter: I think about gaming and specifically chess. Like I got into chess because I had a little foldy fold out travel kit and then I'd play, and then I got in chess league and I'm, in first grade. Second grade, I win a rook, and now I'm through this process of [00:49:00] teaching my son.
And it is this game where you dip in back out. It's physical, it's digital. There's these larger storylines. And I think it, as we've been talking, I've been reflecting on what chess tells me about how I make decisions across the story arc of time. Like I remember just like anguishing over the right choice in a competition.
And now when I play my son, I'm like, I don't know, whatever here. Take the bishop. I'll figure another way, right? It's just really. a much different, looser strategy that's been informed by life choices or he doesn't threaten me too much right now, but it's been a pleasure to chat today. I look forward to hearing other, folks and their responses to this.
And, I've been delighted to, to be reflecting on chess as a longer multi decade relationship.
Erik Allebest: Yeah. thank you so much for having me. I love these conversations. I'm passionate about what I do. I'm passionate about gaming. I appreciate you [00:50:00] and your podcast and all that you do to, to help you look at it all from, all the different angles.
It was a great conversation today. would love to hear from, your audience as to, their further thoughts and questions and let's keep the dialogue going. And, so appreciate you very much.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. Thanks so much for being here. If people want to reach out to you, where's the best way to ask questions about building their own games?
Our audience is mostly indie game developers and creators. Where can people find you?
Erik Allebest: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty, pretty accessible on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out and, always happy to be supportive of the ecosystem. I hope that today I know our playbook was, a little different and we got lucky in a lot of different ways and, happened at a different time and with a different type of game.
But hopefully some of this will, will inspire, this, generation of amazing game builders to keep creating great stuff. So good.
Nate Kadlac: Absolutely. Thanks for being here, [00:51:00] Eric.
