Cult building in black and white: How chess became one man's redemption

Dark Squares: A cult leader, a child prodigy, and the chess revolution

by Danny Rensch

Published by 

Hachette

368  pages  ₹799

  International Master Danny Rensch is a former chess prodigy. As the Chief Chess Officer of the website Chess.com, the 40-year-old is among the most important individuals in the game. Rensch is also a recovering alcoholic and the survivor of a cult known informally as “The Collective”. 

 

Chess.com generates staggering levels of engagement, with over 230 million members, and 20 million games played every day. It hands out over $ one million annually in prize money. This book offers an insider’s perspective on how a game that’s been around for a millennia became a leading e-sport. 

 

As the person in charge of the chess on Chess.com, Rensch organises events and dreams up innovative formats. He finds commentators and streamers. Most critically, given the prize money, it is his responsibility to perform the key task of weeding out cheats with least fuss.

 

Until Covid, the site was moderately profitable. Then, membership exploded. It grew exponentially again, when the Queen's Gambit aired. It continues to grow, albeit at a slower pace. It has also spawned an ecosystem that includes other high-traffic chess websites, high-value streaming channels, online coaching, and so on.  

 

The book deals in detail with one of the most infamous cheating scandals, with its account of the Hans Niemann – Magnus Carlsen face off in 2022, seen from the perspective of Rensch and Chess.com. (The book was written and published before the other “quasi-cheating scandal”, wherein the late Grandmaster Danny Naroditsky was hounded and cyberbullied after repeated, unfounded accusations of cheating by former world champion, Vladimir Kramnik.)

 

Many readers will pick up the book for the chess and promptly get sucked into the fascinating yet creepy world of the cult in which Rensch grew up, the Church of the Immortal Consciousness (Aka “The Collective”) under circumstances that were bizarre and horrific. 

 

This is a first-person story of his life and since his life revolved around chess from the time he was ten, it is also an account of how chess has changed as a sport over the last 30 years. Chess turned him into a shining beacon of hope for the cult and eventually, it gave him a lifeline out of it. 

 

The book is searing in its honesty, and also very funny in parts. Speaking as someone well acquainted with the ecosystem it describes through three decades, it is also authentic in its depiction of the evolution of the sport. 

 

There is zero technical chess content. It’s about the personalities and the ecosystem. Profanity and four-letter words are also liberally scattered through the text. It is as though Rensch was describing his life to a therapist in an act of catharsis.

 

The cult was founded and run by a medium called Trina Kamp, and her husband Steven Kamp. Trina used to “channel” a (non-existent) 15th century Englishman, Dr Pahlvon Duran, who would offer sage advice. Steven was the charismatic individual who gathered the flock and pulled in the money.

 

Their daughter Marlow was married to Steven Rensch – Danny’s father, who abandoned his mother, Deb, to marry Marlow when Danny was three weeks old. He was seven when he learned his neighbour, “Uncle Steve”, was his father. 

 

Most of the cult members – some 300 of them— lived in an Arizona Mountain village, which is where he grew up.  There was no plumbing, or reliable electricity or chartered schools. The homes were broken-down communal hellholes. The kids were taught the 3Rs in random fashion and allowed to run wild in an idyllic landscape.  

 

Rensch senior was a successful attorney turned mystic, and number three in the pecking order. He did the enforcing when members stepped out of line. The cult encouraged alcohol abuse and members were told to excoriate each other for offences in sessions where everyone got blind drunk. 

 

Danny’s mother was also a cult member but low on the pecking order. When Danny was ten, he saw Searching for Bobby Fischer, (a movie about a chess prodigy named Josh Waitzkin), got addicted to the game and discovered he had a talent.

 

Kamp, an enthusiastic amateur player, had a brainwave: Teach chess to the kids and use their success at it to create a great image for the cult. In séances, Duran told Rensch that he had been put on Earth in order to become a chess champion, and win glory for the cult. 

 

He was elevated from being just another “village rat” into someone high on the totem pole. He was legally adopted by his father resulting in one of several name changes, and removed from the influence of his mother, to whom he did not speak for several years. (As an adult, he discovered his legal guardianship had changed multiple times.) 

 

The kids were put through intensive, if haphazard, chess coaching. The cult hired Grandmaster Igor Ivanov, a Soviet émigré who was a larger-than-life drunk to run training sessions. With almost nothing else on the curriculum, the kids from “Shelby School” (which wasn’t really a school) learned the intricacies of chess fast and zoomed to the top of the US scholastic rankings. 

 

At 17, Rensch was an alcoholic with damaged hearing due to untreated ear infections. He was married to a cult member with two kids. How he went from there to being Chief Chess Officer is the rest of the story. He also rescued his marriage, reconciled with his mother, quit drinking and freed himself from the influence of Steven Kamp, even as the cult fell apart.  

 

Along with the narrative of redemption, one gets insightful analysis of the mechanics of building a great chess website and community. But what makes the book extraordinary is that it goes well beyond being “just” a story of redemption, by providing an analytical description of the mechanics of cults in plain, unvarnished prose. 

 

It’s written without self-pity or bitterness and with generosity. The author thanks the Kamps and his father in acknowledgements, while dedicating it to his late mother. Danny Rensch never became world champion and enhanced the glory of the Collective. But he did find his purpose in chess, and he’s become the shepherd of a flock of 230 million.