Thirty years after being completely crushed by AI, people have fallen in love with chess again.
May 11, 1997, New York.
IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5 in a six-game match.
This marked the first time humanity lost to a machine at the highest level of an intellectual game.
The final game of that match lasted only 19 moves. Kasparov made a rare mistake in a classic opening, and Deep Blue seized the opportunity precisely to quickly push the game into an irrecoverable situation.
At the end of the game, Kasparov abruptly stood up and left the chess table, his face filled with shock and anger. He later publicly accused IBM of using human chess players for assistance behind the scenes and refused to accept the result.
That day, the whole world was discussing the same question — in the face of machines, is there any dignity left in human intelligence?
Fast forward to March 2016, Seoul.
Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated South Korean 9-dan Go player Lee Sedol 4 to 1. This impact was even greater than Deep Blue, because Go was regarded as "the last fortress of human wisdom". The number of possible positions in Go far exceeds the total number of atoms in the universe, and experts previously predicted that AI would take at least another decade to beat top human players at Go. The "divine move" Lee Sedol played in the fourth game made AlphaGo lose its way briefly with a probability of one in ten thousand, winning the only game that humanity took home in the series.
Later, people realized that this was probably humanity's last victory over a Go AI.
May 2017, Wuzhen. AlphaGo swept the then world No. 1 player Ke Jie 3-0. Ke Jie lay on the table in the mid-game of the second game, and after the match he said a sentence that silenced everyone: "Last year I thought its playstyle was still close to humans, but today"
"It plays like the God of Go."
In the same year, DeepMind announced the retirement of AlphaGo, shifting its focus to more "useful" scientific research fields.
The war on the chessboard is no longer worth fighting for machines.
From Deep Blue to AlphaGo, these human-machine duels form a clear and solemn narrative — machines are getting stronger, humans are retreating steadily, and these ancient intellectual games seem to have been sentenced to death by AI.
But the real story is as unexpected as a chess game.
In 2026, nearly 30 years after chess was completely crushed by AI, Chess.com, the world's largest chess platform, boasts 250 million registered users, over 10 million daily active users, and annual revenue exceeding 200 million US dollars.
Far from dying out, chess is now at the absolute peak of its popularity in its thousands of years of history.
How could a game that has been completely "solved" by machines attract more and more players?
Surge of Unprecedented Traffic
Erik Allebest, CEO of Chess.com, recently reviewed the story of people falling in love with playing chess again on a podcast episode.
In 2005, he and his friend bought the domain name chess.com for $56,000 at a bankruptcy auction. At that time, almost all investors told him that this was an "uninvestable niche hobby". His classmates at Stanford Graduate School of Business also advised him to "go do something serious".
No one believed that chess could become a big business.
Erik lived up to expectations and did not raise a penny of financing. He could only rely on the savings he accumulated from selling his previous company and a small amount of money borrowed from his friend's mother, and the two of them started building the product. The platform went online in 2007, started charging membership fees 18 months later, and quickly became profitable.
Chess.com's main business is very straightforward | Image source: Chess.com
Over the following two decades, Chess.com grew at a pace of "hiring as many people as we can afford" and never considered financing again.
Interestingly, three small incidents in the few years before the current AI boom completely revitalized Erik's chess website.
The first wave came in 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic locked everyone at home, and Netflix's hit series *The Queen's Gambit* was released the same year. The story of a talented female chess player ignited global audiences' interest in chess, leading to a surge in registrations on Chess.com. But Allebest's reaction at the time was not excitement, but concern — "Will this be just a fleeting craze, like buying treadmills and making sourdough during the pandemic?"
The second wave was even more unexpected.
In 2023, chess exploded on short video platforms. A large number of chess content creators emerged on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Chess.com launched an AI robot called Mittens — a seemingly harmless cartoon kitten, but with terrifying chess strength that could crush the vast majority of human players.
Mittens, the chess-playing AI launched by Chess.com, is "cute and quiet" but has superb chess skills | Image source: Chess.com
This kitten went viral on social media, and "I got crushed by a cat" became a global meme. In the same year, a cheating scandal surrounding young chess player Hans Niemann made headlines, pushing chess into a broader public view.
A key phenomenon Allebest described is that — after each wave recedes, the user baseline is much higher than the last one.
This is not a fleeting traffic pulse, but step-by-step growth. The baseline before 2020, the baseline after the 2020 wave receded, and the baseline after the 2023 wave receded are all higher than the previous level.
Why can the chess website retain users after each surge in traffic? Because chess is not just "recommended to people", but people find it genuinely fun.
This leads to a more fundamental question.
Winning Is Not the Goal — Playing Is
Allebest said a widely quoted sentence on the podcast — people want to acquire human skills even when machines have far surpassed humans in these fields; people appreciate exceptional human craftsmanship even when machines can do it better.
This sentence is very insightful, but we can go one step further.
The logic of machines playing chess is purely instrumental.
For Stockfish or any chess engine, every move is a means pointing to one single goal — winning. It has no concept of "experience". It will not feel excited when coming up with a brilliant mid-game move, will not feel frustrated after being checkmated by the opponent, and will not have the "aha moment" epiphany when reviewing the game.
A win is just a win, nothing more than a change in a string of numbers.
But for humans, playing chess is a completely different experience.
An amateur player who spends 10 minutes playing a blitz game on Chess.com does not care at all how Stockfish evaluates his moves. What he cares about is the little pride of "I saw a tactical combination that the opponent missed", the tense feeling of a racing heart during the final countdown, and the curiosity of clicking the analysis after losing to figure out "which move I did wrong".
These things are the whole meaning of the game itself, which has nothing to do with winning or losing. To put it more concisely — the reward of the game is the act of playing the game itself.
The existence of AI, on the contrary, amplifies this purity.
More than 30 years ago, IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov | Image source: Britannica
Before Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the chess world was enveloped in a heroic narrative. Who is the world No. 1? Can human beings preserve their dignity? The chess king competitions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War were even endowed with ideological weight.
The act of "winning" was overloaded with far too many meanings.
But after AI completely put an end to the question of "who is the strongest", a wonderful liberation took place.
Since humans can never beat machines, the games between human players are no longer a "competition for the strongest", but return to the most primitive state of the game — I play a game with you just for fun.
After the anxiety about winning and losing is lifted, the pure joy of the game is released instead.
At the same time, the role AI plays in the chess ecosystem has increasingly become like "infrastructure".
Chess.com is using AI to create a "coach in your pocket" — analyzing your recent games, telling you which parts can be improved, and even allowing you to talk to the AI coach. In the past, if you wanted to improve your chess skills, you had to pay to hire a human coach; now, you can open your phone and access a teaching system that is always on call. AI is also used for anti-cheating — judging whether a player is using engine assistance by analyzing their move patterns.
Even AI products like Mittens Bot have become "content" that attracts new users on their own.
AI did not kill chess. It became a tool that makes more people fall in love with chess.
Go: The Silent Mirror
Unfortunately, the same story did not repeat itself in the Go world.
Three years after AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, Lee Sedol announced his retirement.
He said the paradigm shift brought by AI put an end to the "art" of Go, and he could no longer find joy in it. The thousands of years of accumulated "joseki" in the Go community, those standard sequences that generations of players regarded as truth, were proven by AI to be nothing more than solidified biases. The "3-3 invasion", which was once considered "rude" and forbidden to be taught to children, quickly became a standard move for professional players after AlphaGo used it without hesitation.
Deeper changes have taken place at the cultural level of professional Go.
Before the emergence of AI, professional players had distinct styles, and Go fans could identify who was playing just by looking at the game records, so Go was regarded as an art. After AI emerged, everyone started memorizing AI moves, competing to see who has a higher "AI move matching rate". The stories in Go commentaries disappeared, replaced by win rate curves and matching rate data.
Ten years ago, Google's AlphaGo defeated South Korean national player Lee Sedol, who was then the top player in the Go world, almost breaking the "backbone" of Go | Image source: Google
South Korean Go reporter An Seong-mun once said a poignant sentence — "Heroes are no longer created, all we hear is who ranks where."
Both crushed by AI, chess is getting more and more popular, while Go has experienced a "collapse of meaning" at the professional level.
The root cause does not lie in the difference in the complexity of Go itself, but in the structure of the community.
Chess has long been a mass game in the Western world — elderly people playing in parks, school clubs, blitz games in bars, with a base of hundreds of millions of amateur players who "just love to play". No matter how strong AI is, it cannot affect the motivation of this group.
Go has a completely different positioning in East Asia. It is part of the "Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar" alongside guzheng, calligraphy and painting, and is seen as a tool for elite cultivation and education. Chinese kids learning Go usually follow the same logic as learning piano — driven by parents, focused on passing graded exams and moving up ranks, with utilitarian purposes coming first.
When the majority of a game's users are here "for the result", and AI destroys the meaning of the result, the game loses its support.
The rising popularity of Ke Jie and Zhanying on Bilibili has indeed brought traffic to Go. But to be honest, the audience is mostly drawn to the players' personal charm and "absurd, meme-style interactions", not to Go itself.
This is "chess players becoming internet celebrities", not "Go becoming a mass sport".
Millions of games are played every day on Chess.com, which is the real scenario of "people playing chess"; the barrage carnival in Go live streams is closer to a form of entertainment consumption.
This article is not intended to praise chess and belittle Go. Instead, through the success of Chess.com, we can see some fundamental issues.
In an era when AI is about to surpass more and more human skills, a question worth thinking about over and over again is — what is our motivation for doing something, to win, or to enjoy the process?
Those activities where "the process itself is the reward" — playing chess, playing music, writing, painting, running, cooking — may not die out because AI is better at them. Instead, they will become more pure after the pressure to "win" is lifted.
And for those things that we originally did solely "for the result", AI will indeed take them away. In a sense, AI should take them away.
The prosperity of chess in the AI era tells us that humans will not stop doing something just because machines are better at it.
What truly determines whether something can survive is never "who does it better", but "what exactly are humans enjoying when they do it".
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "GeekPark" (ID: geekpark), written by Techno Zhiwang, edited by Jing Yu, and published with authorization from 36Kr.