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