Millions of kids are discovering chess and a 27-year-old chess nerd on TikTok is their new star

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Chess fever broke out in US schools and universities in 2023. Millions of kids and young people have discovered the game of kings for themselves. The world’s most important chess website is 6 times its size before the pandemic. And a 27-year-old chess nerd becomes a star on TikTok.

What’s going on there? Since January 2023, chess has experienced its biggest boom in 31 years. In 1972, chess was something of a Cold War emblem because of the “Match of the Century” between Bobby Fischer (USA) and Bors Spasski (Soviet Union).

Today chess is lifestyle.

As the US site Polygon writes, chess mania has broken out in schools and universities in the US, many first-year students play chess every free minute and everywhere on the camps and have now apparently infected the whole generation.

The seeds of success are Netflix, TikTok and the butt of a Twitch streamer.

The Queen’s Gambit in the trailer

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Chess is 6 times more popular than before the pandemic

How can you measure the chess boom? The main place on the internet where chess is played is the website Chess.com. They had such a big spike in January 2023 that they had to significantly improve their servers:

  • before the pandemic, Chess.com had fewer than 2 million active games per day
  • in April 2023 it was 12 million a day

    • Streamer Ludwig Ghgren hosted an event of “chess boxing” on YouTube, reaching millions of viewers.

    Hikaru Nakamura., the grandmaster reaches an average of 11,700 people when he plays chess on Twitch.

    Netflix and a Twitch streamer’s butt are fueling boom

    Why is that? There were apparently 3 events that triggered or fueled the chess boom:

  • In 2020, the very good Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” was released – that reignited the love of chess
  • There was a scandal in September 2022 when world chess champion Magnus Carslen lost to twtich streamer Hans Niemann, accusing him of cheating. An absurd theory on Twitch was that Niemann had sex beads up his butt and received secret signals from the vibrations
  • Then, on January 1, 2023, there was another chess boom closely associated with influencer Levy Rozman

    • Who is the star of this new trend? There are some popular and strong games like Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura or the Botez sisters. They were precursors to the chess boom on Twitch.

    But the star of chess right now is Levy Rzoman, a 27-year-old who goes by the nickname GothamChess.

    He is the leading chess influencer on entertaining media consumed especially by young people, such as TikTok, Instagram or YouTube Shorts.

    He also won the Chess Streamer of the Year award.

    GothamChess explains the chess hype in a minute:

    @levyrozman Why chess? #chess #chesstok ♬ original sound – GothamChess

    How is that seen in the US? Most teachers seem generally happy that the youngsters are turning to chess. But sometimes it degenerates and disrupts the lesson. Some schools are said to have already banned chess.

    Polygon quotes a South Dakota biology teacher:

    I heard cheers in one of the aisles and I wondered what bad things were going on. I was surprised to see a group of freshmen sitting at their laptops and phones, immersed in some very heated chess games.

    The teacher says the older students initially dismissed it as a “weird freshman thing” and then they got chess fever too.

    The Botez sisters are chess influencers on Twitch.

    Influencer Rozman is asked if the kids are good. He says: No, they are not:

    “Everyone plays bad chess except the absolute masters. Why shouldn’t we celebrate bad chess? That’s how we all play.”

    The statement that the absolute experts don’t play bad chess can also be doubted after this story:

    Chess: Genie slips stupidly with the mouse, loses to Twitch streamer – last game as world champion ends with outburst of anger

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