There are certainly enough red flags to give one caution ... keep in mind that this isn't exactly a huge ICO, where folks are throwing tons of btc into the ICO, however. It's almost equivalent to those 'near-free' coins that used to be run here, where folks would throw .05 btc or similar crumbs for a stake.

So just for fun, I personally don't see a problem at those sorts of ICO purchase levels. Definitely some oddities with how things were set up, including the bela connection and selling some coins early. The social media campaign/yobit are non-factors to me (unless it's the early trading aspect), which I agree is a bit weird, but lots of coins use social media campaigns, so not a problem there in my opinion.

Bots is the bigger issue, and not sure if that one is easy to get around. Only way I can think of is either tons of annoying captchas during a game, or that the max. amount of coins allowed to be transferred per match is really small ... too small for most folks to bother using bots.

Still... all I expect to see is a chess android app, ideally a chess web portal, some minor chesscoin sorts of betting, which would be at the level of a decent-sized faucet. If the devs manage that and support the coin, that would be a reasonable expectation in my mind.

Will chesscoin get professionals using it? Nope. Major organizations? I'd be amazed. As for the project being done to make money for its developers, of course... no developer here is doing this not to make money. Look at amount invested so far, and you'll see they aren't exactly making a ton of money though. So if you ask me if this is an ICO to throw tons of btc at, or should be considered a longterm, hold for years, sort of coin ... nah, not to me anyway ... cheapo coin just for fun, worst case we get an android chess app + faucet level competition... sure, not a problem to me. Unless the devs abandon the coin at some point or do something extremely shady, that is, then it's not exactly something just for fun.