FAQ

Take Take Take (TTT) is a chess improvement app built for players who actually want to get better. It combines structured learning — lessons, puzzles, and drills — with a Play zone where you play real games against opponents at your level, and every game feeds back into your improvement journey. Think of it as the Strava for chess: the app that makes progress feel like progress.

It's a chess phrase. When a piece captures another piece, the move is called a "take." Three takes in a row — take take take — is that rare, exhilarating moment when the board opens up and everything changes. It's aggressive, joyful, and a little unexpected. That's the energy we want the product to have.

Our primary audience is what we call the "Improver" — someone who knows how to play chess, loves the game, and genuinely wants to get better, but hasn't found a tool that makes the improvement journey feel clear and motivating. We're not trying to replace YouTube tutorials or chess textbooks. We're trying to make daily chess practice feel as satisfying as a great workout.

The company was founded in late 2023 by Mats André Kristiansen (CEO), alongside a small team of designers and engineers. The idea came out of conversations about why chess improvement apps all looked and felt roughly the same — and whether it was possible to build something meaningfully different. Three years later, we're launching the answer.

Oslo, Norway.

TTT has two main zones: Learn and Play.

Learn includes structured lessons, targeted puzzles, drills, and improvement tracking. Play is where you actually play chess — matched against real opponents at your level, with a format designed to make each game part of your longer improvement arc.

Both zones are fully integrated: what you practice in Learn informs your Play experience, and what you struggle with in Play feeds back into your Learn recommendations.

Chess.com and Lichess are great platforms. We use and respect both of them. But they're primarily built around playing chess — finding a game, clicking play, and going. We're built around improving at chess. The experience is different from the ground up: how you track progress, how lessons connect to games, how the product talks to you about what to work on next. We're not trying to replace those platforms. We're building something different.

Maia is an AI chess engine developed by Ashton Anderson and the University of Toronto. Unlike traditional engines, Maia was trained to play chess the way humans play — making human-like moves, including human-like mistakes. That makes it significantly more useful as a training tool: you're playing against something that moves like a real person at your level, not a perfect machine deliberately slowing down. TTT integrates Maia to power the adaptive opponent experience in the Play zone.

TTT is a freemium app. A meaningful core experience is free. Premium features — deeper learning content, advanced tracking, and full Play functionality — are available on a subscription basis at around $6–8/month. We'll share exact pricing at launch.

Yes, TTT is available on both iOS and Android.

Magnus is a supporter of what we're building. We're not going to go beyond that publicly right now — stay tuned.

We've raised two rounds: an initial founding round and a seed round totalling around 36 million NOK. Our investors include Gustav Witzøe, Futurum, and a number of individual angels.

We had a great run with Titled Tuesday — it gave us enormous visibility and we're proud of what we built there. We decided to end the sponsorship because we're at a stage where building our own community events makes more sense than running our brand inside someone else's house. We'll be announcing our own weekly event soon.

Yes, and we want to do more of it. We believe creators are the most important distribution channel in chess right now, and we're building tools and a platform that give creators real value — not just a sponsorship deal. We'll be announcing our creator program properly at launch.

Lichess is TTT's infrastructure partner for the Play zone. They are the world's leading non-profit, open-source chess platform: free for everyone, community-run, funded by donations. Our Play zone runs on Lichess infrastructure, giving us instant access to a large active player pool and instant pairing from day one. The partnership reflects a shared belief that chess should be open and accessible, not locked behind one commercial platform.