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We even joke about the ‘B tournament’, meaning: ‘Are you with anyone? Are you seeing anyone?’ And then the groupie side of it has always been there, although not as much as rock bands.” “People often end up getting together,” says one source, who preferred not to be named. The combination of alcohol and being on the road can also make relationships between players – and even chess groupies – more common than you might think. Last year a video emerged of Nakamura wrestling in the street with another grandmaster, Eric Hansen, after a drunken blitz game turned sour, watched on by other bemused players. There has been plenty of other drama off the board too: grandmasters regularly sniping at each other on social media, players falling out over rogue chess moderators, or even, in Dutch grandmaster Anish Giri’s case, having their private messages hacked and leaked.

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It’s a sign of the times.”Ġ4:19 How to cheat at chess: the theories and fallout of a huge scandal – video explainer “But now there’s a new way of being known in chess, and it doesn’t mean you have to be the best in the world. “She was really known during her time,” Cramling says of her mother. Another, entitled I Trolled This Chess Hustler Into Thinking I Was a Beginner, has been watched 2.4m times.Ĭramling is probably now better known than her mother, Pia, a grandmaster who has been one of the top female players for nearly 40 years. A video of her playing a street game against Carlsen in July has attracted 3m views on YouTube. Instead, she has become a popular chess personality, despite being ranked about 17,000th in the world.Ĭramling has succeeded because she produces content that is creative, universal and very watchable. Two years ago, she was planning to study international relations or politics at university. “Alexandra Botez was the CEO of a tech startup in Silicon Valley before she decided to try streaming.”Īmong the new breed of female streamers is 20-year-old Anna Cramling from Sweden. “A lot of the superstar streamers are incredibly talented, academically and socially,” she says. But, as Jennifer Shahade, the two-time US chess champion and author of Chess Queens, points out, they have found a way to connect with new chess audiences – and they work hard to maintain it. Nakamura aside, most chess content producers are not among the world’s elite. He’s basically just hacked an online algorithm that means you’re going to be successful.” “Nakamura was noted for being fantastically strong at bullet chess long before it was sort of hip to play online, and he has turned into the perfect chess streamer, making millions,” says King. Nakamura would do this while answering questions on chat and giving blow-by-blow accounts of the latest chess drama. Suddenly, players such as 34-year-old Hikaru Nakamura, who was once ranked second in the world behind Carlsen in classical chess (which takes hours to play), were spending far more time streaming their online “blitz” or “bullet” games, where they have just three minutes to make all their moves. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (left) and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit.

“They became absolutely massive, and chess really crossed over.”

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“During the pandemic was also incredibly smart in recruiting esports stars to play in a series of amateur tournaments called PogChamps,” says the grandmaster Daniel King, who also runs the YouTube channel Power Play Chess.

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In August 2022 the popular and free website Lichess hosted more than 92m games – compared with 37m in August 2019 and 6m in August 2016. Then came the multiplier effects of the Covid lockdown and the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, which sent chess’s popularity into the stratosphere. His company, Play Magnus Group, was recently sold for about $82m.īut another notable development in chess’s growth came at the end of 2017, when the biggest chess website,, pivoted towards making the game an esport by partnering with the streaming platform Twitch. Carlsen used to model for G-Star Raw, came 10th out of 7.5 million players in the 2019 Fantasy Premier League competition, and is also a decent poker player. The world’s best player for more than a decade, he is young (31), witty and whip-smart – and he has a hinterland outside the game. Meanwhile, at the top level, stories abound of cheating, excessive drinking, groupies, even death threats – if not yet at the same time. Millions more are now playing and watching. Online, a new breed of glamorous chess “streamers” has sprung up, some of whom earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.