Dark Squares by Danny Rensch
Date completed: November 9, 2025
The co-founder of Chess.com puts out an autobiography—one would assume it would be about his journey into creating the world's largest online chess platform (and a large contributor to how large online chess has become, professionally and non-professionally). Perhaps the “standard high-school-dropout” finds an incredible idea and makes big bucks getting a startup with no VC funding, etc.
But this wasn't quite like those stories, and I had a great time with it. This follows Danny's journey in a cult called “Church of Immortal Consciousness” and how he essentially grew up being passed around the community members within the cult, was manipulated into thinking that his “purpose” was chess, and was emotionally (and physically) abused by the surrounding adults.
Apart from the recounts of his experience within the cult, I found his account of the Hans Niemann scandal particularly interesting. With my very limited (and perhaps biased) knowledge of the scandals recounted by a few chess YouTube personalities[1], it appears that Danny is very firm in his stance that Hans did indeed cheat and has a history of cheating.
In light of the recent death of Daniel Naroditsky, I kind of hoped that the book could've touched on that topic as well[2]. Especially because Daniel has been outspoken about being selected to be proctored by Chess.com and has mentioned how some of these playing conditions have led him to unfair playing conditions. It really does seem like cheating will be dominating the conversations within chess communities for the foreseeable future, and frankly, I don't really know how the issues could be resolved.
Overall, I recommend this book, but I did wrongly assume that it would've been more focused on Chess.com's formation. It definitely did touch on that, but the majority of the book is centered on Danny's journey (understandably so), and even when he was focusing on Chess.com matters, the Niemann v. Carlsen scandal took up the majority of the word count.
Update [29th of November, 2025]: This is a great article that details who Daniel Naroditsky is and the accusations Vladimir Kramnik made, written by Jennifer Shahade.
Biggest "CHEATING" SCANDAL In Chess History, Explained: The Biggest Cheating Scandal In Chess History ↩︎
Specifically, Vladimir Kramnik's accusations of cheating on Daniel, which Daniel has mentioned affected his professional and personal life more than a year ago.↩︎