World Chess Launches Global Campaign: "Chess Is Very Good For You"

The campaign is live across the London Underground, with sites at Liverpool Street, Canary Wharf and Tottenham Court Road placing it in the heart of the City. Created in the bold, graphic style World Chess is known for, each poster works on two levels: a public-interest message about the benefits of the game, and — in the pink box, for the City it sits in — a reminder that chess is played by an estimated 600 million people worldwide, and that the company building for them is headquartered in London and listed as CHSS.

It is an umbrella campaign by design. By promoting the benefits of chess itself, World Chess aims to grow the sport as a whole — and, with it, the audience the company serves. What's good for chess is good for World Chess. To support the claims, the company has commissioned its own independent research into why regular play is good for you, and intends to publish further findings over time, adding new reasons under the same banner.

The first of those reasons is already live: a standalone look at why chess is good for your career, drawing on research into how hiring managers read chess on a CV.

The campaign reflects a deliberate move into growth. World Chess has rebuilt worldchess.com to compete with the category's leading platforms on product, and believes the real opportunity in chess is not the contest for players already loyal to a platform, but the far larger population of newcomers. Rather than scaling through paid media, the campaign is built to travel: the full creative is being offered, free, to FIDE's roughly 190 national federations to run in their own cities and languages — extending it internationally while the company focuses on its home market.

It is also the marketing expression of how World Chess operates — its subscription platform, its broadcast property the World Chess Show, and its live events, including the World Series of Chess in 2026, working as one system to bring new people to the game and keep them.

Ilya Merenzon, Chief Executive Officer of World Chess, said:

"Chess is one of the world's most played games and one of its least commercialised. This is an umbrella campaign — what's good for chess is good for World Chess, and chess is genuinely good for you. We've commissioned our own research into why, and we'll keep adding reasons. We've built a product to compete with the best in the category, and we're marketing it with the bold design we're known for, because a move into growth should look like something. The real opportunity is the hundreds of millions of people who play but have never had a company built for them. We intend to be that company."

See the campaign at worldchess.com/chess-is-good-for-you.

The full regulatory announcement is available on the London Stock Exchange here.