Chess Dreams: When I Grow Up I want to Create Good Content and Get Acquired by Play Magnus

 Play Magnus is now the most powerful force in the chess universe. Their CEO and Chess Superman, has acquired a lot of cool chess assets, these consist of the New In Chess business, Chessable, and employing several high profile chess content creators.



What is the Play Magnus corporate strategy? I have not got the slightest clue, I guess if you buy up all the good people who create content then your competition has nothing. 

Play Magnus has floated on the stock market and is the first chess company to have had a successful IPO. This is surprising given that Chessbase and Chess.com were market leaders for so long and basically sat on their market monopolies for so long without capitalising on it to go to an IPO.

What is slightly weird is Chess.com is still courting Magnus Carlsen by paying him to play in their august online chess competitions. Don't they realise he is their competition? Penny hasn't dropped yet.

Chessbase is fine they don't really want chess world domination like Play Magnus do, they are content to incrementally improve their CB product range and dabble in chess neural network powered chess engines like Fat Fritz, which is okay I guess. 

So who can give Play Magnus some competition in the chess corporate moves? 

Answers on a postcard, I'll announce the winners in a few weeks if we aren't already acquired by Play Magnus by then. 😳



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I invented Puzzle Rush 10 years before Chess.com released it.

Image
  I t was in 2008 when I had finished my chess server WebChess X using open source code WebChess. I opened my chess server and found it was thriving but had a problem with some users cheating. I spent a few months in mid-2008 racking my brain as to how to solve the problem. I eventually came up with an idea. Why not create a test which randomly quizzes users with chess puzzles but make it time constrained and rated so I could validate that the ELO of the user was still consistent with the results they were getting. So I wrote the code in PHP utilising my database of over 10 million chess positions. I also used some open source code called LT PGN VIEWER by Lutz Tautenhahn which had a guess-the-move app, problem board script. The app recognises FEN strings from pgn files of game fragments and matches the move played with the move string loaded. The app I built was simple it randomly selected a position and asked the user to play the winning move. It had to be just that move because t...
Read more

Book Review: 300 Most Important Chess Positions by Thomas Engqvist

Image
 Okay straight off the bat I was like didn't Grandmaster Lev Alburt already do a book about these 300 most important positions?  Yes, he did and this was a re-imagining of his book. So the positions and the categorisation of the positions are very different. This works really well. If you are as busy as me, I am a fully time Fintech programmer, Co-Founder of the world's biggest grassroots chess community, and app developer and Netflix binger. So not much time.  The question is if you study these positions will you become super strong? The answer is categorically NO, but if you get an ML (machine learning) algorithm to search for all the similar positions and you train your neural network (brain) on those positions night and day in a deep learning training system you will be unbeatable. I can. I have a couple of hundred million master-level positions in a searchable database and I can specify each of those themes IM Thomas Engqvist has highlighted and can build a flashcard...
Read more

How I ended up Working with Netflix on The Queen's Gambit #NetflixTheQG

Image
 I watched The Queen's Gambit on Netflix as soon as it was released. I may have been in the first half million people in the world to have watched it as I watched pretty much sitting motionless for 7 hours but for comfort breaks. Afterwards, I tried to find out what Netflix had done on social media for the show. I went onto Facebook, nothing, Twitter, nothing, Instagram nothing but some weird stan account with tens of thousands of fans but didn't even seem like they were legit or even pretending to be. In a panic, I even went to TikTok and of course nothing. Okay so I went back to Twitter, they had posted some low key promotion on Netflix and Netflix Queue but still, no dedicated social media account anywhere. I was astounded. Well, this just was not going to be good enough for me (and I suspected a few million chess fans and randoms). I started writing DMs to Netflix Executives and eventually found the actual Social Media Manager. I told her exactly what I thought about the am...
Read more