Netflix series fuels a surging interest in chess
For a long time, Dan Pelletier’s quest to bring chess to the kids of Bridgeport was a fairly lonely one.
His evangelizing for chess often took the form of driving to the city’s libraries and sitting at a table with his chessboard, urging passersby to engage in games.
“I’ve been going to Bridgeport since I was 26,” said Pelletier, 32, of Shelton. “We found a good player at North Branch Library who was in the first or second grade. We sponsor him in tournaments now.”
But even that modest success didn’t prepare Pelletier for what happened this month when he sent an email to parents through the Bridgeport Public Schools, asking if they wanted to enroll their children in free online chess classes. Within 48 hours, he had more than 150 responses. In the past, he said, similar marketing efforts elicited about 20 responses.
“I couldn’t even go into my normal inbox because there were more than 100 messages,” said Pelletier, founder and president of DIG USA, a private education company that teaches chess, soccer and other skills to children.
Chess, as it turns out, is having a moment. The website Chess.com reports there have been 13 million new members this year — a 200 percent increase from 2019. In Connecticut, other chess groups also have reported a bump in interest, including the Hamden Chess Club, which has experienced a 20 to 25 percent increase in membership from a year ago, said Rod Groff, founder of the
Play More Chess Academy in Hamden, where the club meets.
Chess instructors have partly attributed the spike to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept people, including kids, at home. Another factor is the popularity of the Netflix miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit,” about an orphan who discovers that she’s a chess prodigy.
Since the show premiered in October, it’s been viewed in 62 million households, which Netflix said is a record for the streaming service. The phenomenon of “The Queen’s Gambit” has bled over into the game that it centers on.
“It’s probably daily that somebody that I haven’t talked to in a long time text messages me and says, ‘Have you seen Queen’s Gambit?’ ” said Pelletier, who has seen the series.
Groff agreed that the double whammy of a lockdown and a popular, chessfocused show have been good for the game.
“When the initial lockdowns happened in March, there was a surge of interest in online chess,” he said. “Our classes also moved online and and each week of our online kids’ summer program was full. It is exciting to see how ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ series on Netflix has created a second wave of interest in learning and playing chess.”
Nick Barton, director of business development at Chess.com, said he thinks this perfect storm is creating “a second golden era of chess,” which hasn’t been this popular since the 1970s.
“You’ve seen kind of a culture shift as well — lots of new players brought into the game who might not even know how to move the pieces,” he said.
Pelletier, for one, hopes the bump isn’t a passing fad. In addition to his work with DIG USA, one of his side projects has been an effort to turn Bridgeport into a thriving chess mecca. He said he’s always believed that kids in the city could benefit from the complex, intellectually challenging board game.
Unlike a lot of games, chess isn’t just fun, but educational, Pelletier said. It teaches strategy, focus and other skills that are useful in daily life, he said.
“We’re trying to teach kids to think ahead about they’re doing and to think about the future,” he said.
So Pelletier said, about 200 families in Bridgeport have responded to his initial request about interest in free chess classes. He plans to start teaching in January, using Chess.com.
“We’re going to take 200 kids and we’re going to provide a great service,” he said.