Addicted to Chess, All by Design
Stella Schwartz, 16, hopped on the chess bandwagon earlier this year after hearing about the game from her older brother, Hugh, a high school senior in San Francisco. Alex Post, a freshman at the University of Colorado, started playing in February, after some chess-related videos appeared in his TikTok feed; then he got his whole fraternity playing.
Many other young people said that they, too, had recently developed a chess habit, although they could not recall how it started.
Since early November, the number of daily active users to Chess.com, a website and app where visitors can get chess news, learn the game and play against one another and computer opponents, has jumped to more than 11 million from 5.4 million, rising sharply after the beginning of the year.
The biggest growth has come from players 13 to 17 years old — 549,000 visited Chess.com in January and February, more than twice as many as in the two months prior, the company said. The second-fastest growing age group in the same period was 18- to 24-year-olds. “It’s everyone, every single day,” Ms. Schwartz said. “I’ve seen people play at parties.”
Some may attribute the trend to pandemic boredom, or perhaps to the popularity of the 2020 Netflix mini-series “The Queen’s Gambit.” But quietly a grandmaster plan was carefully crafted by Chess.com to broaden the appeal of the game and turn millennials and Gen Z into chess-playing pawns.
Were they playing chess, or was chess playing them? “Everything was targeted right at high school, college and junior high,” said Erik Allebest, chief executive officer of Chess.com.
The strategy “was very much deliberate,” he said: to
erase the perception of chess as a grueling, geeky battle of wits and to package it instead on social media as less intimidating, even fun. The matches offered on Chess.com also play to impatience. Timed games can be played at various lengths: 10 minutes, three minutes or, if that seems interminable, one minute. Still too long? Enjoy a 30-second match! Sometimes, Mr. Allebest said, it’s just about sport for sport’s sake, “not about getting better.”
Soon, it was game over, and chess had won.
Behind the scenes, Chess. com was working to change the game’s image. Chess.com hired college students to manage its online presence. The students were encouraged to be irreverent and to create memes, Mr. Allebest said. A recent post on the site was titled “Why chess sucks” and offered as the main reason, “I always lose!”
The site’s Instagram account features short, offbeat videos, including a man in a puffy green pawn costume, who at one point trips over an electrical cord. Joker takes pawn.
Before long, online chess personalities had emerged.
Levy Rozman, 27, is an international master and a lively, charismatic commentator better known as GothamChess; Mr. Allebest described him as a “chess prophet spokesperson for 14- to 25-year-olds.” Grandmaster GMHikaru has 1.91 million YouTube followers.
Alexandra Botez, 28, another celebrity on Twitch and YouTube, earned a particular claim to fame: Once, while streaming a match, she blundered into losing her queen and reacted with bemused shock that made the gaffe seem cool. To accidentally lose your queen is now known as the Botez Gambit.
Mr. Post said he was drawn in by “a bunch of clips” — TikTok videos by GothamChess — at a moment when he was “bored.” That was in February; now, he plays every day, including sometimes in class.