Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of smiling at my phone.
My affair with the game of chess started about six days before this past Christmas when I got a text from my uncle telling me that it was time to continue our annual tradition of me telling him what I wanted for Christmas — and that invariably being the newest version of FIFA. But this year, for the first time in a while, I didn’t want a video game. Instead, I wanted a subscription to Chess.com.
The ramifications have been frightening. It’s gotten to the point where I really can’t focus anymore. Be it in class, meetings or social situations, I’m constantly thinking about playing chess. I’m not very good, and there’s really no excuse for why I’m terrible at answering texts from loved ones but always respond to my chess notifications from a friend of a friend who I’ve hung out with twice. For better or worse, chess has become what I play when I’m bored, so I play it a lot.
However, the far more interesting part of my recent chess addiction is not what it says about me, but what it says about the game of chess itself. Because latent in the 1,224 games of online chess I’ve played over the past three years is an enormously successful partnership, a changing culture and the resulting massive resurgence of chess that I’m only a pawn in.
***
In 2020, the chess boom made sense.
For years, chess had been made accessible through websites like Chess.com, lichess.org and chesscafe.com. Then, amid the height of the pandemic, Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” and it was a massive hit. Sixty-two million households watched the series within 28 days of its release. At a time when people were trapped and in desperate need of entertainment, chess was not only available, but visible: the game exploded.
Chess.com saw 100,000 sign-ups a day, the sale of chess sets jumped 1,100% and in many respects, chess was back in the cultural psyche in a way it hadn’t been since the 1972 Fisher-Spassky world championship. People saw chess, romanticized it and wanted to play it.
The current chess boom, though, is much harder to explain. There’s no massive cultural touchpoint romanticizing the game, no major cause or effect, and frankly, no clear cut reason as to why the game of chess should have chosen now to become more popular than it ever has been before.
But in the past three months, that’s exactly what’s happened.
“I’ve been playing chess my whole life, and I’ve never seen as many people pull out chess on their phones or computers as they do nowadays,” Kevin Hass, former Michigan Chess Club president, told me.
In all but five days of January 2023, Chess.com saw record numbers of sign-ups. On Jan. 20, the site hosted 31,700,000 games, and in February, one billion games of chess were played on Chess.com. Chess has exploded: the game is growing and reinserting itself as a cultural touchpoint.
Attempted explanations for this vary. Some cite the media uproar about Hans Niemann’s alleged cheating scandal and humorous yet prurient theories as to how he did so. Others refer to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’s viral photo above a chessboard, and some even posit that Chess.com’s extremely powerful chess bot, innocently named “Mittens the cat,” fueled the spike in interest.
The real origin of the chess boom cannot be found in one moment or cultural touchstone, but rather in a brilliantly effective strategy that has changed the perception of and culture around chess. Chess is no longer simply accessible, or just visible; it has become relatable.
***
I, like many others, grew up with a very romantic — but also very stiff — image of chess.
I learned the game from my grandpa over a wooden board while sitting in a coffee shop. At 15, when I asked my Dad how to get better at playing, he handed me a dusty copy of “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” so old that the pages dissolved into clumps of sediment as I turned them.
I didn’t learn much, but the book only furthered my association of the game with heroic qualities. To me, chess seemed like a deep reflection of power struggles and battles of wit played by men in suits while smoking cigarettes.
And for much of its 1,500 year history, that was the image the game carried. Chess was seen as a highly academic and rigid pursuit. But in late 2015, a strategic partnership between the live streaming service Twitch and Chess.com was formulated, altering the age-old perception of chess.
“The really quick version is that Chess.com was already working on content and trying to get into the streaming game … like ‘how can we work together to make this bigger,’ Michael Brancato, Chess.com VP of esports and former Twitch Senior Manager, explained to me. “Twitch was like, ‘Oh, we see a lot of potential in chess, like why is nobody streaming chess or making content around it?’ … Those conversations just sort of progressed over two years and they turned into a partnership where both Twitch and Chess.com were putting up financial resources to do whatever they can to make chess bigger on Twitch.
“Twitch had money, and Chess.com had money and they’re like, let’s just do whatever we can to make chess bigger. Like how do we get more people streaming? How do we incentivize them? How do we make more tournaments streamed on Twitch?”
So the two entities focused on making chess visible. Chess.com founded a streamers program — incentivizing those interested in streaming by promoting their content, providing them with free memberships and working with Twitch to get their streams on the front page. They created tournaments with monetary incentives — exclusively for streamers — and began streaming high quality chess tournaments with entertaining analysts.
Then, Chess.com took things a step further.
“There was also a big degree of outreach to people who we think could be good streamers,” Brancato said. “This is people like (Alexandra Botez) and (Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura). Back in this time, they weren’t streamers, and we thought that they had a lot of potential.”
Today, Nakamura boasts 1.7 and 1.85 million followers on Twitch and Youtube, respectively, and Botez has garnered 1.1 and 1 million for herself on the same sites.
Chess found its stars in people like Nakamura, Botez and her sister, and the enormously popular Levy Rozman, also known as GothamChess. They weren’t picked simply because they knew how to play chess, they were picked because they were, first and foremost, entertaining people who would attract audiences. Their goal wasn’t to be the best at chess, but to be the best at making it funny, relatable and exciting.
“Medieval imagery is not very cool to a lot of people,” Brancato chuckled. “Chess kind of pigeonholed itself into this corner into being for old people for lack of a better word. So a lot of the work we did was to try to shed that image.”
In order to appeal to more people, chess could no longer be branded as a sport that took itself too seriously — and streaming allowed for that image to shift.
Nakamura, the second best player in the world, pioneered the sophomoric and utterly useless opening known as the “Bongcloud attack.” Rozman started screaming “THE ROOK” to his millions of followers, and slowly but surely, chess became less stuffy, less feared and more relatable.
Streaming allowed chess to become a game that people could turn into memes — a contest that didn’t have to be so formal. Chess could just be a fun and funny game that fun and funny people played. And viewers find that appealing.
“There’s definitely this new day and age where more and more people are seeing that like, ‘Hey, I don’t have to be good to play chess,’ ” Joe Lee, Collegiate Chess League commissioner, told me over Zoom. “ ‘I can just play for fun.’ ”
Now, completely separately from Chess.com’s sphere of influence, chess streaming and culture has started to grow organically. Videos of online games, memes about blunders, jokes about players who aren’t skilled and even jokes about players who are too skilled circulate constantly on forums like TikTok, Instagram and Reddit.
Chess has been turned into content that can be easily consumed by novices, and when people see the game in front of them in digestible bites, they want to play too.
“I think that (humor) is a part of the shift to chess going mainstream, and this has definitely not been a thing in the past,” Hass said. “Like, people did not like go into these places where you play chess and go around yelling ‘THE ROOK’ in a loud voice, or they did not play the Bongcloud. This is definitely a shift in the culture of chess.”
“This is like a new-age kind of chess culture.”
***
I joined Chess.com in late 2020, two months after the release of “The Queen’s Gambit.” Throughout 2021, I would plant myself in the office of the pool I worked at on my breaks and log into the sticky desktop computer to play game after game. But eventually the spell wore off, and eventually I stopped logging in.
Two years later, amid chess’s largest spike in popularity ever, I started playing again and upgraded my membership. I didn’t know it at the time, but I wasn’t acting independently in either situation — I was part of a shifting dynamic of millenia-old game.
Everyone knows of chess. According to YouGov, 70% of the adult population of the US, UK, Germany, Russia and India have played at some point in their lives, and the game has long been viewed as a symbol for power and prestige.
Messi and Ronaldo didn’t pose with a chess set because it’s their offseason hobby, they did it because it made them look masculine, intelligent and cunning. But that image isn’t why chess is growing; in fact, that image is partially why the game was stagnant for so long. Rather, chess is booming precisely because it can finally appeal to people who don’t feel like imagining it as a heroic pursuit. Streaming and the content commodification of chess has allowed it to be stupid, funny and just plain fun. It is accessible, visible and now — for the first time in a long time — relatable to the average person.
After 1,500 years, the game and its culture have gotten a facelift — and not coincidentally, chess is booming, and I just can’t stop thinking about it.
Statement Columnist Charlie Pappalardo can be reached at cpappala@umich.edu.