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tapes directly. Sleator sent Fanning a bill for the spam, which he didn’t pay, and the argument escalated until the company kicked Fanning off the service and refunded the rest of his membership fee.

That got Fanning mad. He hired Dzindzichashvili and Dakhnovsky, Sleator’s volunteer, who in turn helped Fanning recruit other Carnegie Mellon students, including Ali Aydar, who was working on the Free Internet Chess Server. The team used the code from the free project to start a rival service for Fanning, which he named Chess.net. And Fanning didn’t stop there. In 1996, he filed a lawsuit against Sleator Games in Massachusetts, claiming that the firm had improperly barred him from advertising and thereby cost Chess.net $248,000 in potential profits. At first read, the suit appeared ridiculous. But it allowed Fanning to capitalize on resentment among chess players who had to pay to play on Sleator’s network. Chess.net posted inflammatory statements like this one on its site: “Chess.net was started by International Chess Grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvili . . . with the help of the company that produces Roman’s instructional chess videos. . . . Roman was forced to do this by ICC, who prevented Roman from selling his video tapes on ICC.” As the rhetoric flew in chess chat rooms and on bulletin boards, Fanning built a following by allowing free games and charging only for additional services. And in the legal process known as discovery, Fanning sought to learn all of ICC’s business partners, a move that struck Sleator as a bid to obtain “a list of people they should contact if they want to run a chess server.” The sniping and bad blood continued as the lawsuit dragged on until 1999, when Fanning’s lawyers won court permission to abandon it: They told the judge that their client owed them $94,341.82 in legal bills.

For Chess.net, Fanning used a core of Carnegie Mellon students and graduates, including Dakhnovsky, Brian McBarron, Matt Ramme, and Aydar, a son of Turkish immigrants who was swayed by Fanning’s claimed business connections. Because Fanning had paid Dakhnovsky so little for Chess.net work while he was finishing college, Dakhnovsky demanded an unusual price to move to Boston: a new BMW Z3. Much to his surprise, Fanning called his bluff and agreed. Dakhnovsky flew to Boston, and the two men picked one out. Fanning put an $8,000 down

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