This post is the result of me answering a Quora question “Why is chess dominating Twitch right now?”. I reproduce it with some minor changes here.

To say chess is dominating Twitch is arguably going too far, but there is no denying chess has been really booming lately. Just yesterday, chesscom posted the following on their official twitter account:

How did this sudden popularity of chess happen and what caused it? Well, there are basically two factors:

• Rise of the interest in online chess due to the corona crisis
• Series of collaboration streams between prominent chess streamers (initiated by top GM Hikaru Nakamura) and most popular streamers on Twitch

In this answer, I will examine both of these factors in turn.

First of all, there is no denying that interest in online chess has been peaking since early March due to the coronavirus lockdown and cancellation of all over-the-board tournament.

I mean, just a couple of days after the hell broke loose and virtually all countries started shutting down, chess playing website Lichess announced their servers were crashed down because of the influx of new users:

A couple of days ago this crash repeated again as the number of users TRIPLED in a matter of days (before the corona-crisis, Lichess had an average 30k people playing, while during the lockdown it rose to ~80k people).

It was not only about Lichess though. Since I was fortunate enough to start working for a chess company on the 1st of March (spoiler alert!), I could witness first-hand how the number of users on the website kept increasing on a daily basis. It was kinda surreal to see how some companies prosper at a time where the whole world is locked down.

But this boom was not only related to chess companies and their number of users. You could really get the feeling that the entire chess community is locked down in their homes. When the unfortunate Candidate tournaments was happening, literally EVERYONE was tweeting about it and commenting it. As if the entire community shifted online with the intention of staying there.

This was also true of chess streaming and chess on Twitch. Before the lockdown, the number of streamers was fairly increasing, but there were times in the day where there was literally ‘noone’ streaming chess. After the lockdown, you suddenly got the feeling that EVERYONE is streaming chess – from well-known Grandmasters like Jorden Van Foreest to average club level players who just wanted to have fun.

Literally, whenever you logged on Twitch in the last couple of months, you could find several chess streams with a respectable number of viewers. Many people started to do it out of boredom, but many saw a real opportunity, given the circumstances and the general situation in the world.

Enter Hikaru Nakamura.

The American super GM has been streaming on-and-off for quite a while. But once the quarantine started, he also found himself “stranded”, with no live events scheduled.

So he started streaming on a daily basis, and his channel started picking up the heat, reaching anywhere between 4–8k viewers every day – not a bad number for a chess streamer and the consequence of the increased interest in chess in time of quarantine.

However, things wouldn’t really explode were it not for one stream during which Hikaru noticed another popular Twitch Streamer, former professional Overwatch player Felix Lengyel a.k.a ‘XQC’

playing chess

This has been brought to Nakamura’s attention, who managed to arrange a collaboration stream with XQC where he taught him chess – and as they say, the rest is legend.

Literally overnight, Hikaru became a big Twitch superstar as a big majority of XQC audience (XQC averages more than 30k viewers daily) started following him more closely.

He did even more collab streams with XQC and organized several XQC watchparty streams where he would literally watch him play and comment on his moves and his Twitch numbers also soared – he averaged more than 20k viewers in that period (and maybe still does).

Sure enough, once the crossover between Twitch streamers and chess players has been breached, all floodgates opened. Very soon other famous Twitch streamers started showing interest in chess and other chess streamers (most notably Alexandra Botez, Daniel Naroditsky, Hans Niemann and others) started following Nakamura’s footsteps and offered to teach Twitch streamers chess.

(Daniel Narodistky teaching Twitch Streamer/Youtuber ‘MoistCr1tikal’ chess)

These sorts of collaborations attracted a big part of the non-chess playing Twitch audience into chess and are basically the second big reason (apart from corona-virus) why chess is soaring in popularity (especially on Twitch).

Of course, currently ongoing Pogchamps tournament – a competition between 16 popular streamers, organized by chesscom and watched by 50–60k on a daily basis, is a culmination of this trend.

(a screenshot from the pogchamps stream. WFM Alexandra Botez and GM Hikaru Nakamura comment on a game between ‘boxbox’ and ‘papalatte’)

Now, of course, there has been a lot of debate, drama and discussion revolving the Pogchamps tournament itself and the influx of new players in the chess world. I don’t want to dive deep into this because

• this answer is quite long as it is
• it would require a separate and nuanced answer.

Let me just say I personally used to enjoy watching chess streams quite a lot in the past, while nowadays, all the spam in chat and ‘reaction Andy’ type of content (where a streamer watches clips of other streamers and YouTubers and reacts to them) has made the majority of them unwatchable for me.

(average Twitch chat in the Chess category nowadays)

However, by writing this I risk being labeled as a “gatekeeping elitist”.

Which actually brings me to my next, super-long, article titled In Defence Of Elitism In Chess.

To be continued…