How Chess Saved Danny Rensch’s Life: From Cult Roots to Chess.com’s Success

I was raised in a spiritual collective that had a cult leader who was obsessed with chess. And when I was nine years old, I learned how to play and accidentally got very, very good at the game. While you wish there was someone around to kind of like, you know, smack you in the face and say, like, what what what the fuck is going on here? One of the things that happens to abused people is very often abused children They don't stop loving their abuser, they stop loving themselves.

While chess itself was tormentor and that getting good at this game actually ended up having me lose my family in many ways and go through a number of different very real tragedies, I would say that the game of chess both was tormentor and mentor and in many ways destroyed some parts of my life and then saved my life in the end because of that. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Alteger Show. There are a lot of strange, very strange stories in the chess world. I mean, everyone remembers kind of the the dramas around Bobby Fisher and even some of the dramas more recently with Magnus Carlson.

But I have never heard a story as unusual and as interesting as the story that brought Danny Rench into chess. Danny in his career, he's one of the first people out and he helps run chess.com, which has like over 100 million users. It's the biggest chess company ever. So we talk about that a little bit, which is very interesting. But the story of how Danny went from being a kid who played chess to one of the strongest young chess players in the country and why the people around him were motivated for him to do that has to be one of the strangest stories I've ever heard.

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