Chess.com
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Type of site
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Internet chess server, Social media website |
|---|---|
| Founder(s) | Erik Allebest, Jay Severson |
| Slogan(s) | Play. Learn. Share. |
| Website | chess |
| Alexa rank |
 1386 (December 2016[update]) |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | June 2007 |
| Current status | Active |
Chess.com is an Internet chess server, Internet forum and social networking website; it is also the name of the company that runs the site. It is the most frequently visited chess website according to Alexa Internet rankings. According to the website, it has more than 16 million members
The domain chess.com was originally set up in about 1995 by Aficionado, a company based in Berkeley, California, in order to sell a piece of chess tutoring software called "Chess Mentor". In 2005, internet entrepreneur Erik Allebest and partner Jarom ("Jay") Severson purchased the domain name and assembled a team of software developers to redevelop the site as a chess portal. The site was relaunched in 2007. Allebest plays chess at an amateur level. The site was heavily promoted via social media and grew quickly, attracting mainly casual players. In 2009, chess.com announced a takeover of a similar chess social networking site, chesspark.com.
In October 2013, chess.com acquired the Dutch-based chess news site chessvibes.com. In 2014, the site announced that over a billion live games had been played on the site, including 100 million correspondence games.
Chess.com has held regular "deathmatches" since January 2012, whereby two titled players are paid to play a series of blitz games over a non-stop 3-hour period (5-minute, 3-minute and 1-minute, all with a one-second increment). To date, there have been 37 deathmatches, some of them held between top grandmasters such as Hikaru Nakamura, Dmitry Andreikin, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Simen Agdestein, Lê Quang Liêm, Wesley So, Georg Meier, Arkadij Naiditsch, Loek van Wely, Fabiano Caruana, Judit Polgár and Nigel Short.
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