Chess.com swallows Play Magnus while Kushal Jakhria sets new world mark

Chess.com is set to take over the Play Magnus Group in an $82m merger between major chess organisations that will leave the US-backed chess.com as the dominant force in online events. PMG, which went public on the Oslo market in 2020, began with a flourish as a growth stock, but its revenues failed to grow at the hoped for rate, and its share price has halved from its peak.

It appears that PMG’s business model of providing high class commentaries for top tournaments on its chess24 website brought in too few subscribers, even though the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, was and still is a regular participant. PMG’s chessable learning site is its most successful area, whereas the chess24 playing zone has attracted far smaller numbers than chess.com or lichess.

In contrast, chess.com has always been primarily geared towards providing a competitive playing arena for the hundreds of thousands who flocked to online chess during lockdown. Its viewing events have a successful formula of a mix of 5/1 and 3/1 blitz and 1/1 bullet, using a knockout format rather than the all-play-all of chess24’s Meltwater Champions Tour.

Chess.com also provides a platform for chess streamers, of whom the most famous is Hikaru Nakamura with more than a million followers. Women are underrepresented in chess generally but far less so in streaming, where around 25% are female. The most popular is Anna Cramling, daughter of Pia Cramling who last month won her third Olympiad gold medal. Chess.com’s news coverage is good, and its chief reporter, Peter Doggers, is widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.

Whether the merger will work in the long run is questionable. The world champion made it his mission to try to make PMG succeed, and admitting