We've spent three years figuring out what chess is missing.
Here's what we found, and why we built Take Take Take.
It started with a simple observation.
Chess is having a moment. The coolest people in the world play it. It's on Netflix, it's on TikTok, it's in living rooms and coffee shops. The game has never been more popular or more culturally alive.
And yet the experience of actually playing, learning, and improving hasn't kept up. The dominant platforms were built a decade ago for a different era of chess. They're fine for beginners. They're fine for professionals. But for the millions of players in between who genuinely love the game, play seriously, and want to get better, they're not nearly enough.
We knew this because we were those players.
We tried a few things before we found the right one.
Take Take Take started in 2023. We tested fantasy chess formats. We built a game where you predicted match results. We launched a fan zone app for following professional chess and got 200,000 downloads in a few months. We became the #1 YouTube channel for the 2024 World Rapid & Blitz Championship, ahead of Chess.com, FIDE, and Chessbase India.
But every time we hit a ceiling, we asked the same question: what are we actually building, and who is it really for?
We kept coming back to the same answer. The tens of millions of improving players, stuck between casual and serious, who have never had a platform built for them.
So we built them a home.
In 2025, we started building what Take Take Take is today: a platform that brings together play, learning, and the social side of chess in one place.
On April 6, 2026, we launched it.
We're a small, dedicated group of people who genuinely believe chess for improvers is broken, and that we're the ones to fix it.
Mats is an improving chess player (~1500 ELO), which makes him the archetypal Take Take Take user. He's been building and iterating on this company since 2023, and has never been precious about killing an idea when the data says to.
The world's greatest chess player and the biggest name in the game. Magnus grew up loving chess because it was fun, and became the best because he was obsessed. Both of those qualities live in this product.
