From cult kid to chess master: 'I was literally abducted and taken away'
When Danny Rensch was 12 he discovered he was a chess prodigy, but he was living in a religious cult in Arizona and this exceptional talent led him to some dark places.
From a dirt-poor life in Arizona in the 1990s, Danny Rensch rose to become an international chess master.
He went on to co-found chess.com which now has over 200 million users.
But this is no typical Silicon Valley success story.
Danny Rensch, author of Dark Squares and founder co-founder of chess.com.
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Rensch grew up in a religious cult and when his talent for chess emerged, the Church of Immortal Consciousness decided that prodigious talent was his divine purpose on Earth.
The Church of Immortal Consciousness lived as a collective in Tonto Village, Arizona, he told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.
“It was founded by Stephen and Trina Kamp. It practiced an occult set of beliefs that stemmed from a spirit that spoke through Trina Kamp.”
His parents, who subsequently divorced, joined the cult and had a happy childhood, he says.
“Until I learned to play chess, I guess you could say.”
His innate ability for the game led to his life unravelling, as he was both celebrated and controlled by the cult.
By his 20s, he had won national titles and achieved International Master status, but was also a high school dropout, deep in debt, battling panic attacks and alcohol addiction.
His new memoir Dark Squares tells that story.
He learned about chess in 1995 by accident at the age of 12, he says, when he saw the film Searching for Bobby Fischer.
It was like his Star Wars, he says.
“I don't totally know why, but I was obsessed. The Star Wars experience that children maybe of a different generation thinking that maybe they could be Luke Skywalker, too. I looked at the idea of him playing chess and was like, this is amazing. And I want to do this.”
But chess went from "mentor to tormentor", he says. The cult decided that to better pursue his divine purpose he should be separated from his mother, a decision she agreed with.
“In the summer, when I was 13, I was literally abducted and taken away. And my mum, as painful as it is to say, was complicit in the process based on the idea that maybe this was the best for me.
“Maybe I did need new parents because ultimately, she also agreed that our spiritual impact on the planet should be more important than anything else.”
He was adopted by cult co-leader Steven Kamp and began to travel the country playing chess until on a flight one day disaster struck – his ears exploded.
“It was actually the climax, or maybe the inevitable ending of what had been, unfortunately, years and years of neglecting minor ear infections,” he says.
His adopted family hadn't given him the care a mother would and scar tissue had built up in his ears. It was a catastrophic injury, he lost all hearing in both ears, derailing his burgeoning chess career.
“I was bedridden for two years, literally in and out of a surgery table and in bed on Vicodin and Percocet.”
He had little to do and so started immersing himself in the nascent online world.
“I was a part of that generation who was experiencing the birth of the internet as we now know it.”
With time on his hands, he dived into the emerging world of search engine optimisation (SEO) and took the Google AdWords course and began to see how chess could fit into this world.
“I learned how the internet worked. I learned what really made the lifeblood of where people go on the Internet tick. I tried to buy chess.com, which I would learn later had just been bought up literally by my future co-founders. They had just gotten it out of bankruptcy.
“And I bought some other domains that are, of course, not nearly as good as chess.com. But again, with perspective, knowing what was coming, it was all being weirdly written that I was on this other path where I was forced to consider something besides being a world chess champion if I was going to have a life in chess.”
Chess.com continues to grow, he says, reflecting just how many people play the game globally.
“We had 140,000 new people sign up today. And that's just mind blowing that there are still so many human beings.
“And then you think, well, we live on a planet with seven billion people, so there's still a lot more to go.”
The game’s allure lies in it being a “magical, unsolvable puzzle”, he says.
“We can put a man on the moon, but we still haven't solved a game that's been around for more than 1500 years.”
