Checkmate! World Chess to list on London market

The organisation behind a slew of top-degree chess tournaments is piecing alongside one another a London listing to capitalise on a worldwide resurgence of the sport.

Earth Chess has hired advisers at Novum Securities to plot a float on the key industry after initially shelving its plans two-a long time back.

An announcement could appear in the subsequent couple weeks, according to Sky Information, which initially claimed the tale.

The group, which was co-established by main govt Ilya Merenzon, operates the gaming company that underpins the Earth Chess Championship.

The one,five hundred-yr-previous board recreation has loved present day-day revival among the younger generations because of to the explosion of on-line gaming.

It has 600m players and is among the the top fifty most considered groups on Twitch, the Amazon owned movie recreation streaming company, with 17.5m sights a day.

Chess was handed a large publicity strengthen by the Netflix collection The Queen’s Gambit, which established a record for attracting the most sights of scripted collection after its release previous yr.

Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian chess grandmaster, was also the focus of a documentary five a long time back that shone a brighter light on aggressive chess.

Earth Chess was poised to launch a hybrid London listing two a long time back, which would have floated shares as effectively as issuing electronic tokens. However, the approach never ever took location.

The organization was released in 2012 to exploit the mass-industry attraction of chess by way of tournaments, gaming products and services and products.

Even though centered in London, the organization has workplaces in Berlin and Moscow, wherever the sport has a robust adhering to.

Mr Merenzon said: “We feel chess is the only remaining mass participation sport than has not yet benefitted from the investment and creativity of the business sector

“There has been a multi-yr explosion of curiosity in chess, which accelerated during the pandemic, and we are growing our assortment of products and services to hold rate with it’

“For millennia people have performed chess for exciting and for mental challenge. We want to reinvent the recreation so it matches into present day life and over all is available to much more people.”

He declined to remark on the IPO approach