Checkmate! World Chess to list on London market

The organisation powering a slew of prime-stage chess tournaments is piecing together a London listing to capitalise on a global resurgence of the sport.

Planet Chess has hired advisers at Novum Securities to plot a float on the main market soon after originally shelving its plans two-a long time back.

An announcement could occur within just the following handful of weeks, according to Sky Information, which initially reported the tale.

The team, which was co-founded by main executive Ilya Merenzon, runs the gaming service that underpins the Planet Chess Championship.

The 1,500-calendar year-old board recreation has loved modern-day revival amongst young generations owing to the explosion of on the web gaming.

It has 600m players and is amongst the prime 50 most seen groups on Twitch, the Amazon owned video clip recreation streaming service, with 17.5m sights a day.

Chess was handed a massive publicity boost by the Netflix collection The Queen’s Gambit, which established a report for attracting the most sights of scripted collection soon after its release previous calendar year.

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

Planet Chess was poised to start a hybrid London listing two a long time back, which would have floated shares as perfectly as issuing electronic tokens. Nevertheless, the method by no means took spot.

The company was introduced in 2012 to exploit the mass-market charm of chess by means of tournaments, gaming solutions and goods.

While based in London, the business enterprise has places of work in Berlin and Moscow, wherever the sport has a powerful pursuing.

Mr Merenzon explained: “We think chess is the only remaining mass participation sport than hasn’t yet benefitted from the expenditure and creativity of the professional sector

“There has been a multi-calendar year explosion of interest in chess, which accelerated in the course of the pandemic, and we are expanding our assortment of solutions to continue to keep tempo with it’

“For millennia people have played chess for enjoyment and for intellectual problem. We want to reinvent the recreation so it fits into modern life and above all is available to far more people.”

He declined to comment on the IPO method