Chess is booming. A heady cocktail of Queen’s Gambit mania, pandemic boredom, and Twitch streaming has given the ancient board game more visibility than it’s had in a long, long time. It’s been half a century, in fact, since the game last captured global attention so fiercely.
Back in 1972, the USA’s Bobby Fischer and the USSR’s Boris Spassky engaged in a televised battle for the world championship title. The match was treated as a form of Cold War one-upmanship in miniature.
There is a different kind of tussle going on in chess today: not between nations this time, but between an old guard and a new school. Some seasoned players, perceiving a mass of casual fans riding the new chess wave, worry that the game will get dumbed down for the sake of profit. Newcomers, happily ignorant of the discipline chess demands, are lapping up the fruits of their brave new world.
On the many online chess portals available, they are playing classical chess alongside brand new, blasphemously untraditional formats like “King of the Hill” and “Crazyhouse”. Chess is all a bit jolly for the newcomers, in a way that the old school is liable to find flippant. Not that they don’t consider chess delightful: it’s just that they know, all too well, how cruel a mistress it can be.
Take Chess.com’s YouTube channel as an illustration of this new boom. What would be the most-viewed video on a channel pitching itself as the go-to source for coverage of top-level chess tournaments? Clocking in at over ten million views, it’s actually footage of an online match between two total amateurs.
In the video, Cr1TiKaL, a Twitch and YouTube personality, faces off against xQc, an Overwatch World Cup participant, over a virtual board. xQc plays white and opens with e4. The next few moves are familiar and principled, but then Cr1TiKaL shoots out his dark-square bishop to attack the white knight on d4. xQc pushes an unrelated pawn and plays it cool. Cr1TiKaL slides his queen to f6, with dim threats of checkmate on f2 – but as long as that white knight blocks the black bishop, xQc is safe. What will he play next?
xQc leaps the knight over the bishop, leaving his own king defenceless. In their commentary panels, Woman FIDE Master Alexandra Botez winces; Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura’s face turns to stone (FIDE, the International Chess Federation, gives out titles for players who reach a particular rating). On his sixth move of the game, Cr1TiKaL plays queen to f2: checkmate. The whole thing lasted sixty seconds.
This match took place in the second round of Chess.com’s PogChamps tournament. This novelty event, launched in June 2020, pits internet personalities with little previous chess experience against one another for a prize pool of $50,000. The matches were played online with 2D virtual boards by participants in the thick of early lockdown, and live-streamed on Twitch with all the trappings. The tournament was a hit and spawned sequels. PogChamps 3 featured Logic and Rainn Wilson on its player roster. PogChamps 4, sponsored by cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, began on August 29 and continues until mid-September. According to Esports Charts, the main series has thus far enjoyed a combined peak viewership of more than half a million.
In the fight for the future of chess, PogChamps is a central conflict zone. On the one hand, there is the view that all publicity is good publicity. This is the view of FIDE’s chief marketing officer David Llada, who thinks chess promotion has suffered from a seriousness complex. “Is it silly? Yes! Are we making a show out of absolute beginners blundering pieces? Yes! So what?”
There is then the view that PogChamps sells the soul of chess for the sake of big viewership. Throwing chess’s complexity, strategy, and elegance out the window, it puts bad play into the spotlight and makes a joke of the game. Ian Nepomniachtchi, current challenger to Magnus Carlsen for the title of world champion, tweeted that PogChamps is “popcorn stuff,” that the potential it harbours is “just terrifying”. To be fair to the Russian – whose one-off tweet has become something of a bete noire within the debate – a clarifying note was issued stating that he’s “obviously happy more and more people are getting involved in chess”. It’s just that, he went on to say , the “indisputable success of [PogChamps] might set a new standard of a chess show, and I can’t be sure it won’t prevail over other formats”.
At the moment, PogChamps is prevailing over other formats. Per Esports Charts’ review of Twitch streams of chess events since 2018, no event has had higher peak viewership than PogChamps 3, at a beefy 375,000 peak viewers back in February. Part two of the 2021 FIDE Candidates Tournament, a not-exactly-unimportant event determining challengers for the title of world champion, garnered just 140,000 peak viewers.
The fact that PogChamps is so big points to a unique situation in chess compared to other sports: there exists an amateur celebrity league which is outcompeting the professional leagues in the fight for attention. Imagine if Robbie Williams’ Sellebrity format – a charity initiative in which celebrities, from Jack Whitehall to Alan Carr, play football with one another – were expanded into an actual league, featuring permanent celebrity-players with enough fame and favour to make eyes wander from the Premier League to the Sellebrity League, from Arsenal versus Manchester United to Shane Ward Rovers versus Katie Price FC. While absurd, this is sort of what Nepomniachtchi fears for chess, and it is more plausible in chess because the professional format lacks the critical mass to withstand a competitor celebrity format.
Unlike a celebrity football league, PogChamps and its ilk are cheap to organise: design a Twitch template, enlist some internet personalities already inevitably equipped with top-range face-cams, load up Chess.com and go. Neither does it call for hard physical exertion over a period of months: PogChamps 3 lasted just 15 days, and the participants played from the comfort of their homes.
Sites like Chess.com, lichess.org, or chess24.com were around long before the current chess boom, but have recently ballooned in popularity. In March 2020, Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest said that the site would likely go through ten years of growth in just three months. Towards the end of 2020, Allebest reaffirmed the surge and noted that daily active players was up from 1.3 million in March to three million in November.
For casual fans riding this wave, online chess and its videogamey tendencies have the most potential to foment a new, shallower attitude to the game of the kind Nepomniachtchi foretold. The chess portals assign a rating to each user (modelled on the official FIDE ratings, but not at all equivalent), which increases with a win and decreases with a loss. This intoxicating little number is a great spur to keep playing, precisely in order to look better than other users and to climb up the ranks (on Chess.com, player ratings are displayed alongside a percentage figure, stroking the player’s ego by showing what proportion of people they’ve overtaken with their score). Matches on the chess portals are always available: pick a format, and the portal will find an opponent for you from anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. This constant availability of games makes it easy to binge on chess. Coupled with the pursuit of higher ratings, it can turn the game from a meditative, strategic experience into a compulsion.
Chess can indeed become addictive, as Pritam Ganguly, founder of chess website ChessDelta, suggests in his detailed article on the subject. Playing chess in shorter time formats – such as blitz games, in which each player has two to five minutes on the clock; and bullet games, where just one minute is available – can be addictive for physiological reasons. “Blitz games are generally short time-controlled games. You are always in time stress when you play them,” he explains. “So, after the game ends you may even start perspiring. Lots of hormones are released during this, and you get stimulated to play these games again and again.”
Laura Nystrom, public relations lead at Chess.com, agrees that there is addictive potential in chess – indeed, she confirms that the customer service team receive user messages reporting addiction troubles from time to time. She likens starting a blitz game to pulling a slot machine, evoking the same hormonal rush as Ganguly. And she says that Chess.com’s best days for traffic are not at the weekend. Saturday and Sunday are, in fact, the quietest days. It’s during the working week, and particularly Tuesday and Wednesday, when people play in their masses. “I think people are playing chess when they’re supposed to be working,” Nystrom says.
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But she is also optimistic about the potential to enjoy a blitz game even when you lose – instead of smacking the proverbial slot machine and knuckling down for a bitter round two. “You can go out and play football on Thanksgiving, or shoot hoops with your friends, and have no fantasies that you’re going to be a professional basketball player or professional football player.” Why must chess be any different? As online chess sites, amateur streaming culture, and alternative formats introduce “more fragmentation in the chess market”, the casual chess scene, where it’s okay to lose if you have fun and learn, is getting its dues.
As the chess world fragments in this way, professional players are sometimes able to embrace the game’s lighter side while maintaining their integrity, hinting at a potential bridge between the casual and the professional scenes. Lile Koridze, Georgian national champion in various age categories and a prolific Twitch streamer, claims that she plays her technical best the majority of the time but will occasionally make a fancy sacrifice “for content” – the sort of performative chess at which Mikhail Tal, the onetime Soviet World Chess Champion renowned for playing to the crowd, might nod approvingly.
The tension between the allure of chess, and the challenge of playing it well, has spawned a fascinating meme culture centred on the humour of making terrible blunders when you thought you were winning. It is a type of humour suited to the wave of keen amateurs riding this chess boom. Just like the match between xQc and Cr1TiKaL, this humour combines the schadenfreude of seeing somebody play stupidly, with the relief of knowing you’re not the only one who makes dumb plays.
One trope is the “Baka Mitai video”, examples of which have cropped up on YouTube over the past year. The videos take the dry, boring interface of online chess servers – a 2D board and nothing more – and inject life and humour through editing techniques including close-ups and slow-motion. Often, they are replays of games between low-rated players featuring nonsensical move after nonsensical move. Through the editing techniques, they dramatise the bathos of making a move which was thought to be sound but is in fact patently awful.
Imagine the fateful jump of xQc’s knight over to c6 and away from the bishop, but this time in choppy slow-motion, cycling agonisingly through the frames of the knight’s leap. For the soundtrack to this leap, add a man singing in wistful, melancholy tones – and you have the formula for the Baka Mitai videos. They are named after a Japanese karaoke song, the title of which translates to “I’ve been a fool”.
That’s definitely a sentiment that new-school chess amateurs can relate to. But if they take it to heart, and use it to gain an appreciation of principled, intelligent chess, its mysteries and joys, then there’s hope for the game’s future.
