Robinson calls check-mate in four-way auction for Doggers’ The Chess Revolution

Robinson, an imprint of Little, Brown, has signed Peter Doggers’ The Chess Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence and the Internet Brought A 1500-Year-Old Game to New Heights from Peter Doggers.

Editorial director Tom Asker acquired world English rights in a four-way auction from Paul Sebes at Sebes & Bisseling. Rights were also sold in north America after a four-way auction and have also been sold in Brazil, France, French Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Sweden. It will publish winter 2024/25.

Doggers is director of news and events at chess.com, the world’s largest chess platform with nearly 200 million members. In The Chess Revolution Doggers "takes readers not only into the top-secret research labs of World War Two, where thinkers like Alan Turing dreamed of chess machines, but also into the tense silence of American-Soviet world championship games and into the labs where the supercomputer Deep Blue and artificial intelligences like DeepMind were conceived".

Asker commented: “It is remarkable that one of the world’s oldest games has never been more popular than it is today, when we have access to more games, sports and forms of entertainment than ever before. Chess has not only survived the last half-century of rapid technological change but flourished in that time. There are few people better qualified to write the story of chess as a cultural phenomenon than Peter. I can’t wait to publish him.”

Doggers added: “I am delighted so many English and American publishers were interested but Tom was so taken by the proposal and wrote such a wonderful letter that my agent and I decided to go with him. I can’t wait to start working on the book together.”