IM Danny Rensch’s memoir Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life is, as suggested by its title, dark. He suffered from hunger, parental abandonment, and lack of health care, with the last almost costing him his hearing. Playing chess as one of the top young masters in the United States gave him opportunities to travel and to see families living normal lives.
Chess.com
At the 2008 Berkeley International, 23-year-old Rensch was on the cusp of his IM title, an experienced chess coach, and connected to other top players. Into the Berkeley Chess School site walked Chess.com founders Erik Allebest and Jay Severson. They had been working hard on their website for a year. Rensch wrote, “What they didn’t have was any idea what the chess world, and their chess website, was capable of.” Becoming Chess.com’s Chief Chess Officer gave him a chance to fulfill his childhood visions for improving chess players’ lives and for making chess more appealing to the public. And his job gave Rensch, his wife, and their four children a life incomparably better than what he experienced growing up in a cult.
Having witnessed women, including his own mother, being mistreated by cult members, he admitted, “my misogyny went to an entirely different level.”
Misogyny and Defamation?
As a pre-teen and young teenager, Rensch was coached by then-IM (later GM) Igor Ivanov. According to Rensch, Ivanov described his wife as “the Fat Bitch Elizabeth.” Rensch concurred with Ivanov’s assessment of her weight, describing her as “short and enormously obese” though stating she was “sweet and kind.”
Elizabeth died in 2023, so what Rensch wrote isn’t defamation. Under U.S. law, the dead can’t be defamed. But is his description misogynistic? I played in a women’s chess league with Elizabeth a few years before Rensch met her but after she was married to Ivanov. The league lasted for five months. After games, the competitors would go out to lunch together. On other occasions, my husband Doug and I went to Igor and Elizabeth’s home. We played tennis and listened to Igor sing and play the piano. We also went on car rides with them. On those occasions, the words “fat” and “bitch” never came up. Here are her photos and obituary.
Chess Proofreading
Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life is generally free from mistakes in language usage except when chess is being discussed. For example, the word “match” is used when “game” is meant, as in this excerpt about GM Hans Niemann defeating World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in round 3 of the 2022 Sinquefield Cup. Rensch wrote, “Hans started off by being a brat about the whole match” and “The interviewer then started asking basic questions about the match.”
Chess.com has a webpage about the difference between a match and a game. It states, “A chess match is a series of chess games played in succession between the same players.” In other words, Carlsen and Niemann played a game, not a match, at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup. Here is a link to their game.
Besides the mistakes regarding the term “match,” there are also mistakes in the names of tournaments and inconsistencies in how players’ titles are presented. There are no chess games and no chess diagrams in Rensch’s book.
How to Buy
Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life is available from multiple booksellers, see this Chess.com link for some choices. Rensch will also have a book signing on October 4 at Checkmate: USA vs India. I plan to buy a signed copy from him there.
I worked for Chessable from April 1, 2022, to August 12, 2025. Chessable was part of Chess.com for most of that time. With this memoir overlapping with my own experiences in the chess world, such as my knowing Igor (who defeated me in six tournament games) and Elizabeth, and with my time at Chess.com, Rensch’s compelling memoir is an important addition to my chess book collection.
Politics in chess