Today, Rensch helms one of the largest online chess platforms in the world with more than 225 million registered members and 40 million active monthly users. As one of the company’s three cofounders and chief chess officer, he’s an American entrepreneur leading a gaming site beloved by millions. Chess.com says it surpassed a $1 billion valuation in 2023 without any venture backers, entirely bootstrapped by the entrepreneurs who were “laughed out of VC rooms” at the company’s inception. Rensch’s superstar status as a teen and international platform success has made him one of the most powerful figures in the industry. But his entry into the world of chess was anything but usual.
Rensch tells Fortune he first encountered the historic game while watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, which explores the American chess genius who became the youngest U.S. Champion in history at age of 14. Rensch romanticized the idea of a child prodigy finding himself inside the game, and with his life circumstances, the board could serve as a tool for his survival.
But when Rensch first discovered the game as a nine-year old, chess became only the opportunity for him to gain approval in his abusive living situation, but to also pave a path for success once he left.
The cult’s leader, Steven Kamp, was obsessed with chess, and Rensch was quickly pulled into his orbit. Recognizing the potential of his religious pupils, Kamp set up a chess team at an elementary school near the Collective’s setup in Tonto Village. Rensch was told chess was his life’s purpose—and he was alienated from his family in the pursuit of greatness.
“As he saw what we were capable of doing—me and my peer group, the Shelby School chess team—we all got good very fast. I became the best, but the truth is they were all amazing players. We were winning championships left, right, and center,” Rensch says. “Chess became a way to climb the hierarchical ladder of the Collective.”
In 1997, the Shelby School won the Super Nationals chess tournament—and one year later, Rensch took home his first individual national championship title. But when his success sputtered at the age of 14, he was separated from living with his mother in order to sharpen his gameplay in the house of Kamp’s close confidant, who Rensch found out was also his biological father. Chess was not only his passion, but a buoy in those difficult times; as the cofounder explained in his book, “to be special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is to be special in the eyes of God.” Rensch continued to rise through the ranks, becoming the youngest national master in Arizona history, and eventually winning the national high-school chess championship at the age of 18.
The Church of Immortal Consciousness has since disbanded, but now 39-year-old Rensch says reconciling the abuse and stress he experienced for the bulk of his early life is still an ongoing process. He explains—like many who grew up in a cult—he’s on a journey of “unpacking and learning to interrogate those feelings.” Rensch says he has no hard feelings about what happened to him, but the love and attachment he once felt within the cult is now gone.
“Growing into the life that I have, and being an adult now, and many years of therapy, I’m fully aware of what it was,” Rensch says. “With time, the pain got worse, and the success got better, so it became its own very meshy web.”
“Where to pull on the string was hard to really figure out: where my healthy enjoyment as a kid could have began for the game, and where my performance, based on what was expected of me, ended,” he continues. “It was very, very hard to untie those.”
Soon after Rensch was hitting his teenage chess highs, he experienced a serious medical emergency. His eardrums burst on a plane ride, which forced him to be “sidelined and bedridden,” which put him out of the running in competitive chess competitions just as he was hitting his stride. While he was undergoing surgeries, he spent a lot of time surfing the internet, which was still in its early days at the time.
YouTube’s popularity was quickly rising. Sensing the potential of other community-building platforms, inspiration struck—what if there was a way to bring chess online?
Rensch had the chess brains to bring competitive gameplay to the platform, but didn’t have the technical or business wherewithal to launch the idea by himself. That’s when Chess.com’s former CTO Jay Severson and current CEO Erik Allebest came into the picture; Severson leveraged his coding skills to power the earliest version of the platform, while Allebest brought his Stanford MBA expertise to flesh out the business side. However, when it came to securing investors for the site, their pitch was largely dismissed as a pipe dream.
“We were laughed out of VC rooms who said that chess would never be anything,” Rensch recalls. “Nobody invested early on, and it became the biggest blessing in disguise.”
“We got lucky in that we did not pay for The Queen’s Gambit…That was awesome and great for the game that has inspired millions,” Rensch says. “If we had taken a different approach and tried to throttle our customers versus allowing them to do chess however they want to do chess, I think it would have been a different outcome for us.”
