In schools and universities in the USA, chess fever has broken out in 2023. Millions of kids and teenagers have discovered the game of kings. The most important chess website in the world is now 6 times larger than it was before the pandemic. And a 27-year-old chess nerd is becoming a star on TikTok.
What’s happening? Chess is experiencing its biggest boom since January 2023, the largest in over 50 years. In 1972, chess became a symbol of the Cold War due to the “Match of the Century” between Bobby Fischer (USA) and Boris Spassky (Soviet Union).
Today, chess is a lifestyle.
As the US site Polygon writes, chess mania has broken out in the schools and universities of the USA; many freshmen play chess in every free minute and everywhere on campus, apparently infecting the entire generation.
Fertile grounds for success include Netflix, TikTok, and the backside of a Twitch streamer.
Chess is 6 times more popular than before the pandemic
How can we measure the chess boom? The most important place on the internet where chess is played is Chess.com. They experienced such a significant increase in January 2023 that they had to significantly upgrade their servers:
- before the pandemic, Chess.com had less than 2 million active games per day
- in April 2023, there were 12 million games per day
Streamer Ludwig Ahgren hosted an event with “chess boxing” and reached hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Netflix and the backside of a Twitch streamer fuel the boom
What is the reason? Apparently, there were three events that triggered or fueled the chess boom:
- In 2020, the very good Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” reignited the love for chess
- In September 2022, there was a scandal when world chess champion Magnus Carlsen lost to Twitch streamer Hans Niemann and accused him of cheating. An absurd theory on Twitch claimed that Niemann had sex beads in his backside and received secret signals through their vibrations
- In January 2023, there was another chess boom closely linked to influencer Levy Rozman
Who is the star of this new trend? There are some popular and strong players like grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura or the Botez sisters. They were forerunners of the chess boom on Twitch.
The star in chess right now is Levy Rozman, a 27-year-old known as “GothamChess”.
He is the leading chess influencer on short-form media, particularly consumed by young people, such as TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube Shorts.
He also won the Award for Chess Streamer of the Year.
GothamChess explains the chess hype in one minute:
@levyrozman Why chess? #chess #chesstok ♬ original sound – GothamChess
How is this viewed in the USA? Most teachers seem generally pleased that young people are turning to chess. But it sometimes gets out of hand and disrupts lessons. Some schools are said to have already issued a chess ban.
Polygon quotes a biology teacher from South Dakota:
I heard cheers in one of the hallways and wondered what bad things were going on. I was surprised to see a group of freshmen sitting at their laptops and phones, deeply engrossed in some very heated chess games.
The teacher says that the older students initially dismissed this as a “weird freshman thing,” but they too have caught the chess fever.
Influencer Rozman is asked if the kids are any good. He says: No, they are not:
Everyone plays bad chess, except the absolute experts. Why shouldn’t we celebrate bad chess? That’s how we all play.
The statement that absolute experts do not play bad chess can also be doubted after this story:
