World Chess Plc ("World Chess" or the "Company")

Launch of Global Brand Campaign

World Chess Plc (LSE: CHSS | FRA: QZ9), the London-listed chess company and official commercial partner of the International Chess Federation (FIDE), is pleased to announce the launch of "Chess Is Very Good For You", an umbrella brand and player-acquisition campaign that has gone live across central London and is being made available to national chess federations worldwide.

Key Highlights

·      A new campaign, "Chess Is Very Good For You", has launched across the London Underground - including Central and Jubilee line sites at Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Canary Wharf  - placing it in the heart of the City of London.

·      The campaign is designed to grow chess as a sport as well as benefit the Company -  by promoting the merits of the game itself, it aims to broaden the overall audience World Chess serves.

·      It is built on independent research commissioned by World Chess into the benefits of regular play and is designed to expand over time as the Company publishes further findings - adding new reasons under the same banner.

·      It is intended to acquire new players to the Company's platform, worldchess.com, focusing on the large majority of the chess audience who are newcomers rather than existing competitive players and to deepen engagement with the UK community while building the brand for a global audience.

·      The full creative package is being offered free of charge to FIDE's c.200 national federations to run in their own cities and languages - a distribution model designed to deliver international reach at minimal incremental cost.

·      The campaign marks a deliberate step into growth, expressed through the bold, distinctive design for which World Chess is known, and reinforces the Company's integrated platform, broadcast and live-events model.

Background

The campaign speaks to two audiences at once. It is a public-interest message - research links regular play to better focus, decision-making and long-term cognitive health - and a message to the City it sits in: 600 million people play chess, and the company building for them is headquartered in London and listed as CHSS.

World Chess has built worldchess.com to compete with the category's leading platforms on product. The growth is not only in fighting over already-affiliated players, but in winning the far larger population of newcomers, in Europe, Asia and other growth markets. The campaign scales through distribution, not only paid media. National federations can run the campaign in their own cities and languages, extending the reach. 

It is a deliberate move into growth, in the bold design World Chess is known for - and the marketing expression of the Company's integrated model: platform (worldchess.com), broadcast products and live events working as one system to acquire and retain a global audience.

Ilya Merenzon, Chief Executive Officer of World Chess Plc, commented:

"Chess is one of the world's most played games and still one of its least commercialised. This is an umbrella campaign - what's good for chess is good for World Chess, and chess is genuinely good for you. We've commissioned our own research into why, and we'll keep adding reasons. We're doing it with the bold design we're known for, because a move into growth should look like something. The real opportunity is the hundreds of millions of people who play but have not had a company built for them. We intend to be that company."

Further information about the campaign can be found here https://worldchess.com/projects/chess-is-good-for-you

About World Chess

World Chess Plc (LSE: CHSS) is the official commercial partner of FIDE, the International Chess Federation. The Company operates worldchess.com, the official FIDE-rated gaming and subscription platform, with over one million registered users; produces the World Chess Show, broadcast across 50+ markets. World Chess has been traded on the London Stock Exchange since 2023 and is only publicly listed chess company in the world.