Stella Schwartz, 16, jumped on the move earlier this year after hearing about the game from her older brother Hugh, a San Francisco high school grad. Alex Post, a freshman at Colorado University, started playing in February after some chess-related videos appeared on his Tik Tok feed; then he got his whole fraternity to play.
Many other teenagers and young adults said they too had recently developed a regular chess habit, although they couldn’t remember how it started. But according to all reports – from players, parents, teachers, website metrics – the game’s popularity has exploded.
Since the beginning of November, the number of daily active users of Chess.com, a website and app where visitors can receive chess news, learn the game and play against each other and computer opponents, has skyrocketed from 5.4 million to over 11 million, trend increasing sharply after the beginning of the year. (In December, Chess.com also bought Play Magnus Group, a company founded by world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, which includes a mobile chess app.)
Most of the growth came from players aged 13 to 17 — 549,000 visited Chess.com in January and February, more than double the figure for the two months prior, according to the company’s estimate. The second fastest age group over the same period was 18-24 year olds. “It’s everyone, every single day,” Ms. Schwartz said. “I’ve seen people play at parties.”
Casual observers as well as newly avid chess players can attribute the trend to pandemic lockdown and boredom, or perhaps the popularity of the 2020 Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. But a grand master plan was also quietly unfolding, carefully crafted by Chess.com to broaden the game’s appeal and turn Millennials and Gen Z into chess-playing pawns. Did they play chess or did chess play them?
“Everything was squarely geared towards high school, college and junior high,” said Erik Allebest, Chess.com’s chief executive officer.
The strategy “was very well thought out,” he said: erasing chess from perception as a grueling, geeky battle of the wits and instead repackaging it on social media as less intimidating, entertaining, and even funny. The matches offered on Chess.com also play to impatience. Timed games can be played for a variety of lengths: 10 minutes, three minutes, or if that seems endless, one minute. Still too long? Enjoy a 30 second match! Sometimes, Mr Allebest said, it’s all about sport for sport’s sake, “not about getting better”.
Soon before anyone really knew what had happened, the game was over and chess had won. “It happened in a really short amount of time,” Mr. Allebest said of the game’s online growth, “thanks to a handful of crazy seeds.”
The opening
Coincidence – the coronavirus, word of mouth, the beauty of Mr Carlsen – played a part. From February 2020 to February 2021, Chess.com app usage increased from around 1.5 million daily active users to around 4.5 million.
Chess.com worked behind the scenes to change the game’s image and attract new players. That was good for business. Although the app allows users to play for free, its financial model is based on service tier fees ranging from $6.99 to $16.99 per month for additional features such as instructional videos and computer analysis of a player’s games and moves. The strategy was simply to rebrand chess as good old-fashioned fun.
“When I was a kid, chess was for nerds,” said Mr. Allebest. “We started selling the joy of chess and the community, more than just the top players and news from top players. In 2020, the site began hosting tournaments featuring online influencers who weren’t particularly talented at chess but had a large following among young people. These included xQc, a professional video game player and streamer; Ludwig, an eSports streamer; MoistCr1TiKal, another streamer and commentator; and Mr. Beast, a 24-year-old YouTube sensation with 147 million subscribers.
Chess.com hired college students to manage its social media presence. Students were encouraged to be irreverent, funny and create memes, Mr Allebest said. A recent blog post on the site was titled “Why Chess Sucks” and cited “I always lose!” as the main reason.
The site’s Instagram account features short, offbeat videos, including the regular appearance of a bearded man in a baggy green peasant suit once tripping over a power cable. Joker takes pawns.
The Botez Gambit
It didn’t take long for a number of online chess personalities to emerge.
Levy Rozman, 27, is an International Champion and a lively, charismatic commentator, better known as GothamChess; Mr. Allebest described him as “the spokesman for the chess prophet for 14 to 25 year olds”. Grandmaster GMHikaru has 1.91 million YouTube followers. Alexandra Botez, 28, another chess celebrity on Twitch and YouTube, earned a special claim to fame: Once, while streaming a match, she accidentally lost her queen and responded with an endearing, amused shock that made the slip seem cool let. Accidentally losing the queen is now known as the Botez Gambit.
Mr. Post, the Colorado University freshman, said he was drawn to “a bunch of clips” — TikTok videos of GothmanChess — at a moment when he was feeling “kind of bored.”
That was early February; Now he plays every day, even sometimes in class. And he himself became a chess influencer. At a fraternity event, he said, he asked a fraternity brother, “‘Yo, are you good at chess?'”
“He said, ‘Let’s play,’ and then another guy said, ‘I’m decent,’ and it was like a knock-on effect,” said Mr. Post.
Mittens up to D4
Chess.com allows users to play against other people of their own skill level or against computer programs of various levels, including AI opponents that have names and personalities and can be open-ended.
Described by Chess.com as a “hardworking Italian-American plumber,” Fabigi is an intermediate beginner. Depicted as a long-haired human with a reptilian body, Boshi plays at entry-level and is “everyone’s favorite dinosaur sidekick,” according to Chess.com’s description.
But the mother of all January-only Chess.com bots was Mittens, an anime-esque tabby with big green eyes that look a little sad. Mittens was advertised by Chess.com with a chess rating of 1 – the worst. In reality, Mittens was a cold-blooded killer with a sadistic streak.
Mittens was developed with world-class skills and was unlikely to lose to the world’s top grandmasters. Mittens played slowly, seemingly giving the opponent a chance while muttering strange and obnoxious taunts. (“Meow, I have become mittens, destroyer of kings.”)
“We made it strong enough to beat virtually every human player in the world, but not fast,” said Mike Klein, the chief chess officer of ChessKid.com, a Chess.com company.
In January, 40 million games were played against Mittens, who Slate described in a headline at the time as “the evil cat-bot destroying players’ souls.”
exit game
Mr. Klein has traveled the country trying to persuade schools to include chess in their curriculum. He argues that chess is good for the brain, but concedes that the scientific studies he cites that link chess to better performance on standardized tests are “pretty old or don’t have a good control group or aren’t big enough .”
Whether chess offers anything more valuable than other online games is unclear, said Dr. Michael Rich, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Digital Wellness Lab, which studies the health aspects of technology use. It all depends on whether someone is playing and learning with patience or just for the quick digital thrill.
Some teachers complain that chess is more of a distraction than a learning tool. “They play it all the time, school-wide, and it’s gotten to the point where they don’t give anything and only play chess,” an anonymous high school teacher said of students in a post on Reddit, where multiple threads have surfaced on the subject. The mastery appeared to be an afterthought, with the teacher writing, “The only thing is… they’re all really, really bad at it? They are absolutely awful.”
Ms. Schwartz, the San Francisco high school sophomore, said she generally avoids gaming in class and that it benefits her brain. “Chess is an intelligent game,” she said.
Her mother, Emily Stegner-Schwartz, agreed. “I’d rather play chess than, what is that game, Jewel Crusher or Candy Land,” she said, referring to the game Candy Crush. Online chess “is to chess what pickleball is to tennis,” she said.
Her son Hugh, the high school senior, couldn’t remember what first drew him to play on Chess.com earlier this year – friends maybe? “I don’t know, it’s weird,” he said. Now he plays twice a day. And if there was a corporate strategy to catch him, did it really matter?
“Everyone is manipulating people on social media now,” he said. “Chess is not the worst thing to manipulate.”
