Chess Coaching is a $2 Billion Market – And That’s Conservative

Chess can be a game we all play for fun, but actually learning deeper principles of chess and attempting to execute those principles in the dense complexity of consistent, over-the-board matches offers a paradigm for learning in any field. Part of why Chess for Life has been taken a brief pause was to build a marketplace - TownSquare Chess - designed to democratize chess coaching for the 100-million-plus players worldwide. But how big is the opportunity really? And how can we size the market for chess coaching?

Arriving at a ballpark estimate for a market like this can be tricky, but combining some available data and a few reasonable assumptions makes it totally doable. There are surely a few ways to go about this, but given what’s known today, the following three variables suggest a viable, straightforward methodology:

• Variable #1 – Volume – the total number of potential students
• Variable #2 – # Lessons per student – the approximate number of lessons a given student purchases in a calendar year
• Variable #3 – Price – the amount an average student is willing to pay per lesson

Total coaching market = [# students] x [# lessons] x [$ price per lesson]

This analysis will further segment variables 2 & 3 by ability level to paint a more accurate picture, but these three main variables allow us to get to a reasonable number.

It should also be said that this is largely a demand-side analysis; pinning down a number for the amount of people who are both willing and able to coach (the supply side) is tougher, but is nonetheless included at this article’s conclusion. It’s tougher because chess coaching has largely been done at an academy or 1:1 level – there is simply no extant data on the raw supply of coaches, how much those coaches teach, and what they charge on average. TownSquare Chess was expressly created to discover just how large that number is, and to provide a centralized means for all potential coaches to build a business. Using experience and the data we've gathered so far, we've triangulated in on some interesting, but ultimately compelling figures.

Variable #1: Volume

The chess market is massive – and growing. According to the United Nations, ~70% of the adult population (US, UK, Germany, Russia, India) has played chess at some point in their lives. The same report states 605 million adults play chess regularly.

Since this number feels high, and it’s not clear what constitutes “playing regularly” under the UN’s logic, it seems a bit more reasonable to use a more conservative, albeit still sizable number. As of January 2023, Chess.com crossed the 100-million-user mark. For good measure, lichess.org (chess.com’s free, open-source, smoother-UX competitor) reached ~25 million users, with Chess24 and a handful of other sites in the low millions. Many more players compete over the board (part of why the UN figure is so much higher), but given the natural overlap between over-the-board and online play, and among online sites themselves, using 100 million as a baseline feels fair.

And yet, this number will undoubtedly increase. About a decade earlier (January 2013), Lichess.org hosted 100,000 games/month . Today, they host north of 100 million. That’s 1000x growth. Chess.com exhibited parallel growth, reaching 1 billion games / month as of Jan 2023. With streaming, online gaming and content creation only recently hitting the mainstream these past few years, online chess in particular will continue to explode. No – this isn’t a Queen’s Gambit bump – online chess has blasted straight through what some initially thought would be a COVID-we’re-all-forced-to-stay-inside growth hike. It wasn’t; the chess market just kept on going. The graph below (in addition to offering a peek into some TownSquare Chess collateral) charts lichess.org games per month over the past decade – a power-law exponent if there ever was one:

A year from now, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Lichess hit ~125 million games per month, and chess.com reach a proportional 1.1-1.2 billion.?

The central point is that this growth isn’t accidental. Chess is riding the coattails of (i) digital gaming, (ii) streaming, (iii) influencer-driven content creation (e.g., from the Botez sisters to GM Hikaru Nakamura) and (iv) the simple fact that more and more of the developing world continues to come online (notably China, India and several African regions). Online gameplay, learning and chess-centric content has only just gotten rolling.

Variable #2 – # Lessons per Student

A natural second variable to consider is how many lessons a given student takes each week. Multiplying that by the number of weeks they’ll typically work with a coach yields an average number of annual lessons per student.

But layering in different use cases also matters, as certain students will be coming in with vastly different experience levels and related goals (e.g., regular OTB tournament players will typically be preparing serious opening repertoires vs. beginners who might simply be working on basic development and tactics). Deeper, more complex lesson objectives naturally call for more sophisticated, high-level coaching.

Below is an approximation of how many lessons different types of students might command. Again conservatively, it’s assumed that 75% of the 100-million-player population will have zero time, budget or desire for coaching. Players are separated into four groups that take lessons bi-weekly, weekly, monthly, and quarterly (i.e. 100, 50, 12.5, and 4 lessons respectively each year):

All that's left is to map the price of each lesson to each of these groups in order to assign a dollar-value to this market.

Variable #3 – Price per Lesson

Different learning goals require different lessons; different lessons require different coaches; different coaches command different prices. Here’s an estimation of what the market might look like for varying ability levels:

Each row is an average over a potentially sizable range. Grandmasters will naturally command much higher prices than national masters. Some learners may prefer to learn from an NM or IM (even if they’re beginning / intermediate), so coach types may overlap some (e.g., in our first two categories). Location is a second variable that, while not broken out here, is either the most or second-most important driver of price. GMs in India or Eastern Europe may only ask for $60/hour, while U.S.-based GMs typically command $150/hour at minimum. That said, this should serve as a rough estimate for pricing, and encompasses an admittedly broad, but probably not-too-far-off estimation of the chess learning market across ability levels.

Demand for Chess Coaching – A Full Picture

Bringing it all together, the simple math here is [# users] x [# lessons by group] x [price per lesson by group]. For example, to determine the market for lessons for competitive tournament players, multiply [5M students] x [100 annual lessons per student] x [an average price of $150 / lesson]. From a common-sense perspective, lessons will naturally be higher-priced because competitive players are working with high-level coaches and will be working together more frequently. The inverse is true of occasional players.?Below is the full analysis, incorporating all of the data mentioned thus far, and performing a few simple sum-product calculations:

Here's a clean view for simplicity:

It’s also worth realizing that this $2 billion figure for chess coaching refers exclusively to online, 1:1 lessons. This figure doesn’t encapsulate all the academy-based learning that’s done, doesn’t include small-group classes, lectures, courses and video content, or other upselling and cross-selling opportunities. And it’s worth remembering that this assumes zero interest from 75% of the 100 million chess.com users. We’re more interested in realistic numbers here, but a purist’s “total addressable market” is at least $8 billion when you pull in those additional 75 million players.

Could Supply Match Demand?

So if chess coaching is a $2 billion market (or more), could enough coaches actually be marshaled to meet that demand from students? What would we need to believe for that to materialize? The thesis here is yes, but not necessarily for the most obvious reason. The logic has to do less with getting the 20,000-some-odd masters from around the world onto the platform, but even moreso by putting the larger area under the chess curve to work:

Most high-level chess players and masters fall near or to the right of this 99th percentile (i.e.., 2300 online rapid) – and they could all absolutely coach the vast majority of players. Looking a bit to the left of the dotted line to the 3,000 players represented here with a 2100+ rating (see graph below) gives us a 133.3 ratio between (a) 400,000 total weekly rapid players and (b) the ~3,000 rapid players with a rating above 2100:

Proportionally speaking, if we sliced chess.com’s user base the same way–a user base which follows the exact same distribution skew–from chess.com’s 100 million players reveals, we’re left with 750,000 players rated above 2100 worldwide. If each of those players – who represent the 96th percentile and above for online chess players – taught a lesson every other week, we’d have [750,000 teachers] x [25 annual lessons per teacher] = 18.75 million annual lessons taught – nearly 2 million more than the assumption we made for demand (see above for total demand for annual lessons = 16.875 million).?

Now, if instead of just the top 4% of online chess players teaching a single lesson every other week, the top 10% did – the market for lessons would be north of 32 million annual lessons. Is it supply or demand that needs to keep pace?

Looking Ahead

This market holds so much potential because frankly, even the top 25% of players could realistically teach. They couldn’t teach everyone, but they could certainly be paired up with someone who’s ~400 ratings points below them and find several avenues to help that lower-rated player elevate their game. Not to mention, beginners or amateur players could show people the ropes who don’t currently have an understanding of chess, expanding the pie for chess coaching even further to include those not already playing today.

The reason a marketplace like TownSquare is critical for this space is that this market can't be tapped unless students and teachers have the ability to quickly and easily matchmake. It’s simple to know what your rating is; it’s hard to find someone who’s the right coaching fit, within your budget, and the right rating differential above you to grow your game.

To date, solutions for this have been few and far between. Some coaching academies are great, but ultimately limited in the number of students they take on. Elite private schools partner with an elite set of high-level coaches, but take 50% or more of their coaches’ revenue, limiting their coaches’ ability to grow a sustainable, long-term business. Every day, players of all ages are trying and failing to use online chess platforms to find a coach; the user experience has the look and feel of finding a couch on craigslist–with the enjoyment of spending hours searching for a health insurance plan. With a dynamic, easy-to-use platform that has coaches of multiple ability levels and price ranges–and with the ultimate aim of democratizing chess coaching–TownSquare Chess is hoping to change that.?

Follow the TownSquare Chess page for regular updates and content, and check out the couple dozen coaches (and counting) already listed on the townsquarechess.com marketplace. We’re now running events NYC-wide, so feel free to drop us a line if you’re hoping to get your building, school, or group paired up with top-tier coaches. We look forward to learning with you.