Local Chess portal going big

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Chess is one of the most popular board games in the world, and has a long history which is intertwined with computer science and the Internet.  Man-machine matches continue to capture the imagination of millions of people while chess was one of the first games which used the Internet to remove physical barriers in playing the game.

Local upstart ChessCube is now aiming to capture a large chunk of the online chess market with their easy-to-use online chess portal.  ChessCube offers visitors a place to play online chess, receive free chess lectures and browse their online store where they sell chess videos.

The company recently received $ 1.25-million (R 10-million) in funding from InVenFin, bringing ChessCube’s total funding to date to US$1.8m (R 14.6-million).  Mark Levitt, CEO and founder of ChessCube says, “We are delighted to have InVenFin on board as our partner. This investment allows ChessCube to focus on establishing itself as the world leader in online chess.”

The online chess market is fiercely competitive with established services like the Internet Chess Club, Chessbase and others serving chess players across the globe.  Levitt however believes that ChessCube is well positioned to capture a large share of the market.

“A free service, with a great interface, available via a web browser attracts a lot of people due to the immediacy and simplicity. This is what ChessCube is,” explains Levitt.  “One way we compete with the ICC and PlayChess is that we do not (and never will) charge for just playing.”

“We try to compete with Yahoo chess and other services by offering a natural easy-to-use interface with a strong social element. In fact we are launching a new version of ChessCube within the next six weeks that makes the system easier than ever to use.”

Levitt says that it is not hard to charge for premium services on the Internet, and the Internet Chess Club, charging $50 per year to subscribe, is a good example of this.  “As for our own revenue model, we have a number of revenue-based services that we will launch over the next 12 months,” says Levitt.

The ChessCube CEO would not reveal all their plans, but said that users can expect very innovative offerings from the company.  The company is already selling chess videos online, something which has seen very strong growth:  “Our shop growth has been astronomical growing almost 50% month-on-month. You can also expect a great deal of innovation in this arena.”

ChessCube will also be launching a subscription service in late October this year. “While I cannot reveal the exciting details of this service yet, I will say that it will not impact the free playing service that our members have come to love.”

ChessCube currently has over 650 000 registered users from 207 countries, and anyone looking for a game can register and play for free at http://www.chesscube.com/

Chesscube discussion