World Chess Network

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

~ the obituary ~

Two internet chess servers died on 29 May 2007 and the same buyer killed both. The Internet Chess Club bought World Chess Network and bought Chess Live, then closed the pair of them and opened a single server called World Chess Live out of what was left. One buyer, two shutdown notices on the same afternoon.

World Chess Network was the older one, running since 1997, built by Master Games International with money from Dato Tan Chin Nam, a patron who paid for a great deal that chess has never been able to pay for itself. It ran on its own client software with cheat detection written into it, which mattered a little more every year as the engines got stronger than the people operating them.

Chess Live opened on 8 August 2000 under the name US Chess Live, affiliated at the start with the United States Chess Federation. It sold a trial tier and two paid ones above it, Basic and Royal, and it carried free lectures on tactics alongside public chat rooms laid out like IRC.

Neither of them was selling chess. Chess was free on the internet in 1997 and had been free since before the web. What the subscription bought was a strong player talking. Live tournaments came with professional commentary, and there was a format called Banter Chess where a master played a real game and explained every move out loud while he was making it.

The product was a person talking, live, in English, on an American evening. That is the part that never crossed the border. The games were free and always had been, and a Turkish player in 2002 had free servers and a club down the road and no reason at all to send dollars abroad so that somebody could narrate. Paying for commentary assumes the commentary happens while you are awake and in a language you can follow at speed, and for most of the world neither one held.

~ the case file ~

~ banter chess ~

Banter Chess is the one idea here worth carrying forward, and it did get carried forward. A titled player sat down against a real opponent and talked without stopping for the whole game, naming what he was looking at and what he had already thrown out. The audience watched the board and listened to the reasoning arrive at the same time.

Everything streaming chess became after 2020 is that format with a webcam attached. A grandmaster talking through a bullet game on Twitch is Banter Chess running on infrastructure that costs nothing, in front of an audience nobody in 2001 had any means to bill. The idea outlived the server comfortably. The business around it did not.

~ what the subscription was for ~

Free chess servers are older than the web. The Internet Chess Server started on a university machine in 1992, and every product in this story traces back to it through an argument about whether players should be charged. The Internet Chess Club took the paid branch of that argument, and World Chess Network and Chess Live were both built on the same wager: the game is free, so sell the room the game is played in.

The room meant rated tournaments running to a schedule, with staff who kept the place civil between them. Chess Live carried the United States Chess Federation's name at the start, which was worth real money to an American club player choosing where to spend a subscription. None of that was chess. All of it was the reason to keep paying for chess.

~ cheat detection ~

World Chess Network shipped anti-cheating detection in its client, and 1997 is early for that to be a selling point. It was the right thing to be afraid of. Deep Blue beat Kasparov that same year, and inside another few years a free program on an ordinary desktop was stronger than any human logged into the server.

That is the problem online chess has never finished solving. A paid server has more reason to police it than a free one, because the subscription is the promise that the opponent is a person. Every server in this story was selling that promise a long time before anyone had a dependable way to keep it.

~ the name that survived ~

World Chess Live ran from 2007 until 19 March 2012, when the Internet Chess Club absorbed it and retired the name. ICC is still trading, which leaves it the survivor of a consolidation that swallowed two servers and a combined decade of history in one afternoon. worldchessnetwork.com and chesslive.com both still resolve today. One serves an empty page and the other serves the default nginx welcome screen, which is what a domain looks like when it points at a machine that has never heard of it.

What actually got buried was a whole tier of the market. In 2007 there were several paid chess servers with separate personalities and separate subscriber lists. By 2012 there was one, and by 2020 the paid tier hardly mattered next to two free sites carrying tens of millions of players between them. The commentary World Chess Network built a company around is the free part now, and it reaches numbers that server had no way to count.

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