I don’t mind companies charging large amounts of money in chess because chess products aren’t essential. You need housing, food, clothes, access to education, but you can actually live a good life without chess.com’s premium or the latest London course. And you can even derive a lot of pleasure from your chess this way. So it’s up to the customer to decide what has value for him and what to do with his money.

If I had to point one unethical piece of business in chess, it’s the topic I wrote you about a couple years back when you were still working at Chessable : the company was advertising and selling a community work produced by a known and banned cheater : “Indrerk”. This I found extremely unethical because the product should have clearly been labelled as “written by a 1500 player banned twice for cheating online” so customers could choose if they wanted to pay for a cheater’s work or not. That was a miss.