How chess became cool

And who made that happen

The rise in the popularity of chess over the last two years has been phenomenal. The same thing could have been said two years ago, and it would have been just as true then. In the 2020s, a centuries-old board game which does not exactly have a reputation for thrills or excitement has suddenly acquired a colossal audience. Most of the newcomers, it appears, are under the age of thirty. Some are not yet in their teens.

This would have been difficult to predict as recently as the Rio Olympics or the Presidency of Barack Obama. In terms of spectator appeal, chess is at about the same level as meditation and philosophy. Two people sit on either side of a small table and think a lot, sometimes for hours, and eventually either one of them wins or the game is drawn. They then shake hands (or, if they are absolutely furious with each other, don’t shake hands), murmur briefly and walk away. From a casual viewer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter that the winner might be in a state of elation experienced only by the fortunate few, and the loser might be psychologically devastated, and it might take hours for both of them to recover, because by now a casual viewer has found something more interesting to do. The fact is that chess, if you’re not emotionally invested in it, is boring to watch.

Yet its growth has been amazing, as the following example shows. There’s a website called chess.com where you can, without registering, try your hand at puzzles and play games against bots (computer programs with levels of ability ranging from world-class to utterly hopeless). If you register, you get access to far more puzzles and bots, and you can play against real people.

On the thirty-first of December 2022, chess.com hit a new record of seven million active members logging on in a single day. Three weeks later, on the twentieth of January 2023, there were ten million. Short-term, this was a problem, as the server computers which the owners of the site had once considered adequate were now very much not. Long-term, it was fantastic news, a signal that a bright future lay ahead.

So how has this happened? Two compelling reasons have been put forward. One is that, when we all had to stay at home during the coronavirus lockdown, and it was no longer permitted to play football or go out to dinner or meet up with friends, it was still possible to play chess, either at a board with someone living in the same house or online with millions of strangers. Another is that, at around the same time, a Netflix miniseries about chess called The Queen’s Gambit attracted an enormous number of viewers in dozens of countries.

(It’s worth noting here that Queen of Katwe, based on the true story of Phiona Mutesi, who became an internationally successful chess player while living in a slum in Uganda, is a beautiful, moving, inspiring, heartbreaking and occasionally very funny film; but it was released in 2016, when our governments couldn’t stop us playing football or having dinner if we wanted to, and therefore didn’t have anything like the same effect on the game as The Queen’s Gambit did.)

Yet the combination of Netflix and a global pandemic wasn’t enough. The crucial element, the one which has sustained the momentum, was that during this period there emerged a new generation of chess players who proved to be astonishingly skilful on social media in general and on YouTube in particular. Their styles are very different, so you can choose to watch whoever’s personality you find most appealing. Among many examples, there’s the bouncy enthusiasm of Anna Cramling (daughter of a Spanish father and a Swedish mother, both of whom have achieved the game’s highest ranking of Grandmaster), the sizzling banter of sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez, the amusing grumpiness of Ben Finegold (himself a Grandmaster, and by far the oldest of this group at fifty-four) and the biting wit of Dina Belenkaya.

Finegold and Belenkaya are relatively minor figures in this context, but their YouTube videos have had 33 million and 69 million views respectively at the time of writing, which makes them very successful indeed, and deservedly so. Cramling recently gained her millionth subscriber, and has 339 million views. The Botez sisters have 1.56 million subscribers and 690 million views.

Ahead of them all, with 2.36 million subscribers and 776 million views, is Hikaru Nakamura. A Grandmaster since the age of fifteen (he’s now thirty-six), he is without doubt one of the finest chess players in the world today, but he is also a more or less full-time professional content creator.

It’s impossible, however, to talk about what might one day be referred to as the chess explosion without mentioning a twenty-eight year old New Yorker called Levy Rozman. His YouTube channel, GothamChess, will almost certainly have five million subscribers well before the end of 2024, and it has had 2.4 billion views. He uploads videos almost daily, many of them lasting half an hour or more, but in addition to that he has another channel called Gotham Games, sells courses online, streams on Twitch and has written a book, How To Win At Chess, among many other activities related to the sixty-four squares.

Rozman is surely among the most talented and versatile of all YouTubers active today, regardless of topic. He makes instructional videos, videos in which he guesses the elo rating (the system by which the ability of chess players is measured) of subscribers who send him often hilariously awful games, videos about the great players of the past such as Paul Morphy and Mikhail Tal, videos about his own struggles to become a Grandmaster, videos about the dazzling capability of chess engines (computer programs which can see thirty moves ahead and whose elo ratings will never be approached by any human) and videos following the progress of all the major chess tournaments. His recaps in this last category reveal games which most of us would find unwatchable if we were in the room to be the fierce battles they are in the minds of the players, full of devious strategies, brilliant tactics and sometimes tragic collapses. He alters his online persona to suit the content he is providing in any video, becoming earnest, helpful, vulnerable, enthusiastic or clownish as appropriate. Quite apart from its educational and entertainment values, GothamChess is a masterclass in how to be a YouTuber.

I don’t want to speak for Rozman or for anyone doing similar work, and it could be that I’m misinterpreting them, but I think they have all realised, consciously or not, that the most effective way to promote chess to a mass audience is analogous to the way it is played. Chess pieces have no function. They are simply tokens. The position and movement of a tennis ball, a racing car or a javelin are the whole point of the sports in which they are used. The position and movement of chess pieces are indications of how the game is progressing, but they are not the game. The pieces don’t have to be there at all as long as the participants can keep track of what is happening within their heads, which is why a really good player wearing a blindfold can beat a less good player who is able to see the board. A sightless and completely paralysed person could play chess if the current situation was communicated to them, and if they could in turn communicate what move they wanted to play next.

The pieces are not the game, so don’t show people moving them. Describe the game itself, and the extraordinary ability of its finest players. Make chess funny. Make it dramatic. Make it inspiring. Be cute and adorable, if necessary. Show that you know more about chess than your followers without patronising them, except perhaps for comedic purposes and if you know they won’t be hurt by it. These, to varying degrees, are the things Rozman and Cramling and Goldman and Belenkaya and the Botez sisters and the other big-time chess YouTubers do. That’s why they are successful, and why chess is erupting.

And there’s another thing. Chess is a zero-sum game. The scoring system at every tournament from the one at your local club to the World Championship reflects that. After every match, one point is awarded. The winner gets it, the loser doesn’t. If the game is drawn, they each get half of it. There is one point, and it’s going to go somewhere.

Chess content creation is not zero-sum. The fact that a viewer watches a Rozman video doesn’t mean that they won’t also watch a Cramling video. The creators are not competing against each other, or at least not on the board. Quite the reverse, in fact. Everyone mentioned so far has collaborated with at least one of the others (often with spectacular results – however funny you imagine a chess video could possibly be, those featuring Dina Belenkaya and Andrea Botez are funnier) and with still more creators including Eric Rosen, Anna Rudolf and Alessia Santeramo. While they are all in it for themselves to a large extent, they are also happy to promote each other.

This is perhaps the most impressive factor in today’s chess boom. Video views on individual channels are not really important, except to the creators. What is important is that the creators are working together to share enthusiasm for the game they love, and to make it accessible to the rest of us in a fabulously entertaining manner – to make chess, in a word, cool.

Top image copyright Levente Fulop
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode.en

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