S T A T E M E N T

michigandaily.com — The Michigan Daily
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 — 7

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of 
smiling at my phone. 
My affair with the game 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 
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, and 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.”

Kevin Hass competes against a club member Wednesday, March 29.

Streaming, strategy, and the sudden resurgence of chess

CHARLIE PAPPALARDO
Statement Columnist

Portrait v. 
Landscape: 

A public lecture and reception; you may attend in person or virtually. For more information, 
including the Zoom link, visit events.umich.edu/event/103667 or call 734.615.6667.

Sources (top to bottom): Kodak Shirley Card, 1960. Collection of Herman Zschiegner; Robert Wallace and Gordon 
Parks, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” Life, September 24, 1956, p. 99; Found color transparency image, Photo 
Managers, “The Rare Format Slide Guide,” July 3, 2017.

SARA BLAIR

Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of 
English Language & Literature, Vice Provost 
for Academic and Faculty Affairs

Visual genres, anti-racism, 
and the photograph

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 | 4:00 p.m. | Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

College of Engineering senior (and former Michigan Chess Club President) Kevin Hass (left) and LSA junior Robert Maurer (right) play against other club members at a meeting 
Wednesday, March 29.

JEREMY WEINE/Daily

JEREMY WEINE/Daily

