Toronto woman becomes a Twitch star — playing chess
U of T student hopes to close the gender gap and get more girls involved in the game
We all know who the real winner of 2020 is: screen time.
The pandemic screen binge has seen some surprise hits, like “Cheer” on Netflix, Sarah Cooper’s TikTok videos and, over on Twitch, online chess.
Yes, chess, as in the strategy game that sees two players peg off each other’s pawns and rooks and other things on a 64-square board until they can finally corner the king. Spoiler alert: The king is actually a loaf, while it’s the queen who does most of the heavy lifting.
Anyhow, over on Twitch, the biggest streaming network for gamers, people are tuning in in droves to watch chess whizzes and masters play chess, giving “Fortnite” a run for its money.
Well, that might be a slight exaggeration. Chess probably has a way to go before it challenges “World of Warcraft” or anything, but doing pretty good for a lo-fi game that’s more than five centuries old. (And, if you count its predecessor, a sixth-century Indian game called Chaturanga, chess is actually1,500 years old.)
Best of all, while we wait for “We the North” to get back on top, we can still root for Toronto on Twitch, since one of the platform’s best-known chess stars, 20-year-old Nemo Zhou, lives right here in the city. Zho u is a third-year
University of Toronto student who is doing a double major in economics and statistics with a minor in math. She’s been playing chess since she was three years old, a bona fide prodigy.
We caught up with her by phone last week and asked her what it was that drew her to the game at such a young age.
“It was very simply because I liked the shape of the pieces,” Zhou said. “We had this chessboard that had a really cool knight, so my mom helped me find the rules and I started to learn to play.
“I think I’m also just a very competitive person quite honestly,” she continued. “Throughout my life I’ve done a lot of other competitive things, not limited to games, but also sports and music. I’ll compete in anything.”
Zhou said she’s played the flute, badminton, basketball and track and field (the pole vault a specialty). And chess isn’t her only Twitch game, either; she’s a “variety streamer,” meaning her followers can also watch her dominate in “League of Legends.”
Obviously, though, that competitive drive has mostly been applied to chess, given that Zhou has won a number of championships, including the silver medal in the 2008 World Youth Chess Championship, the Canadian Youth Chess Championship in 2012 and 2013 and, at 16 years old, the Canadian Women’s Championship. Since competitive chess takes a lot of training and practice (like any sport), she’s doing fewer competitions these days — and not only because she’s also in school full-time.
“For the last three years, I’ve been doing a lot more exhibition games because I’ve been much more interested in getting people into chess,” Zhou explained. “I’m trying to get more exposure for this game because I feel like it’s still very much a niche thing and I want to make it more mainstream.”
It’s been quickly making inroads into the mainstream this year, largely thanks to grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, a five-time national United States chess champion who has picked up quite the following on Twitch, where over 500,000 people regularly watch him play chess and give advice. Nakamura has inspired many to take up the game while they wait out the pandemic.
It’s worth asking, though, why are we so surprised that chess is a popular spectator sport? We’re all familiar with scenes in parks all over the world that see players square off and crowds mill around to watch the local champ take on rivals.
In 1972, the world watched American Bobby Fischer face off against Russia’s Boris Spassky with, arguably, more global interest than the U.S.S.R.-Canada Summit hockey series.
In the 1990s, chess captured headlines again when grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost a game to a computer named Deep Blue. Twitch is simply the latest medium for one of the world’s all-time most popular and enduring strategy games.
All of the aforementioned famous chess players (and a lot of the people playing in parks) are men, though. While Zhou is by no means the only woman to have achieved success in this field, she’s certainly outnumbered.
“There’s definitely a gender gap and it’s like a chain effect because females got into the game a lot later so we have less representation,” she said. “But a lot of programs are trying to change that and I think that’s really awesome.”
Before the pandemic shutdown, Zhou herself was active in a local program, the girls’ chess program at the Annex Chess Club. Since that’s on hold for the time being, Zhou is hoping to get more women interested in her favourite e-sport over on Twitch, where she currently has more than 70,000 followers.
It’s important to get girls involved, she said, not just for the growth of the game, but also because you can learn a lot from chess that can be applied to school and career life later on.
“I think by playing chess I really learned how to be patient,” she said. “I think anybody can learn chess and learn a lot of good things from it, like how to work hard and keep trying, and also that success doesn’t come immediately.”
Nor does a checkmate.