chess24

» see chess24.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the reason chess.com gave for closing chess24 was maintenance. limited resources against running costs, on technology that had aged past the point where anybody wanted to touch it. every engineer has read that sentence about a system that still worked perfectly well and that nobody was willing to own any more. it is usually true, and it is never the whole reason.

enrique guzman and the german grandmaster jan gustafsson launched chess24 in 2014, late into a market that already had lichess giving the game away free and chess.com selling it at scale. the site did not try to win on the board. its bet was video and broadcast: series recorded by grandmasters explaining their own openings, and live coverage of every serious tournament with commentary you would voluntarily sit through for six hours.

that bet paid off because chess had a specific problem. the game generates enormous quantities of unwatchable footage. two people sit still for four hours and the interesting part happens somewhere nobody can see. chess24 solved it the only way it can be solved, by putting a strong player in front of a microphone and letting them narrate. peter svidler and gustafsson himself became broadcast personalities on that site rather than tournament results, and so did pepe cuenca after them.

the peak years line up exactly with my working life, so the honest note here is not about era or region. i watched none of it. the 2020 boom that made those tournaments famous reached me the way a football score reaches somebody who does not follow football, as a headline about a norwegian.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ banter blitz ~

the format that defined the site was simple enough to describe in a sentence and hard enough that almost nobody else could do it. a grandmaster plays rapid-fire blitz games against whoever is in the queue, and talks continuously the whole time, explaining what they are considering while the clock runs down.

it demanded a specific kind of person: strong enough to play well at speed while narrating it, and willing to lose in public while doing so. gustafsson and svidler built reputations on it that had nothing to do with their ratings. from september 2019 to april 2020 chess24 ran the first international banter blitz cup with a fifty thousand dollar prize fund, won by alireza firouzja, who was sixteen.

~ the year chess moved online ~

in april 2020 there was no over-the-board chess anywhere in the world. chess24 ran the magnus carlsen invitational instead, a quarter of a million dollars of prize money and the world champion's own name on it, played entirely online with the site's commentary team on top. it was the first elite event to make that transition properly, and it worked well enough that it became a permanent circuit under the champions chess tour banner.

that year is what chess24 will be remembered for. the lockdown chess boom had several engines, and a streaming platform that already knew how to make a chess game watchable was one of them. the site was in exactly the right position at the one moment the whole sport needed somewhere to go.

~ what chess.com bought ~

chess24 merged with magnus carlsen's play magnus as in march 2019, which is how the world champion's name ended up on its tournaments. in 2022 chess.com bought the entire play magnus group, and with it chess24 alongside chessable and the rest of the portfolio. the buyer now owned the strongest competitor in tournament broadcast and had no particular use for a second website doing it.

the announcement came in december 2023. "we realize chess24 is still a go-to site for many, especially to watch chess tournaments, but regrettably we will close down the chess24 website and mobile apps on january 31." the commentary team moved to chess.com, the events kept running under other banners, and the domain now redirects to the buyer. the accumulated video archive of a decade, thousands of hours of grandmasters explaining their own games, moved only in part.

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