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Stella Schwartz, 16, jumped 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 Colorado University, started playing in February, after several chess-related videos appeared on his Tik Tok feed; then got the whole fraternity rolling.
Many teenagers and other young adults say they too have recently developed a regular chess habit, even if they can’t remember how it started. But by all accounts – from players, parents, teachers, website metrics – the game’s popularity has exploded.
Since the beginning of November, the number of daily active users of Chess.com, a website and application where visitors can get chess news, learn the game and play against each other and computer opponents, has increased from 5.4 million to more than 11 million, increasing . very after the beginning of the year. (In December Chess.com also bought Play Magnus Group, a company started by chess world champion Magnus Carlsen that includes a mobile chess app.)
The biggest growth came from players aged 13 to 17 – 549,000 visited Chess.com in January and February, more than double the previous two months, according to company traffic estimates. The second fastest growing age group in the same period was 18 to 24 years old. “It’s everyone, every day,” Ms. Schwartz said. “I’ve seen people play it at parties.”
Casual observers, as well as newly avid chess players, may attribute the trend to the pandemic and boredom, or perhaps the popularity of the 2020 Netflix mini-series “The Queen’s Gambit.” But quietly, the grandmaster’s plan is also unfolding, carefully crafted by Chess.com to expand the game’s appeal and turn millennials and Gen Z into chess-playing pawns. Does he play chess, or checkers?
“Everything is targeted at high school, college and junior high,” said Erik Allebest, executive director of Chess.com.
The strategy was “very deliberate,” he said: to remove the perception of chess as a fun and geeky battle of wits and package it on social media as less intimidating, fun, even funny. The matches offered on Chess.com also play for the impatient. The time game can be played in different lengths: 10 minutes, three minutes or, if it seems interminable, one minute. Still too long? Enjoy the 30 second match! Sometimes, Mr. Allebest said, it’s just about exercise for exercise’s sake, “not about getting better.”
Soon, before anyone knew what had happened, the game was over, and chess had won. “It happened in a very short period of time,” Mr. Allebest said of the game’s online growth, “thanks to some crazy seeds.”
Opening
Events – the coronavirus, word of mouth, Mr. Carlsen’s good looks – played a role. From February 2020 to February 2021, usage of the Chess.com app increased from about 1.5 million daily active users to about 4.5 million.
Behind the scenes, Chess.com is working to change the image of the game and attract new players. This is good for business. Although the app allows users to play for free, its financial model depends on the power of the service level, from $6.99 to $16.99 per month for additional features like instructional videos and computer analysis of the game and the player’s movements. The strategy, simply, is to rebrand chess as good old-fashioned fun.
“When I was a kid, chess was for nerds,” Mr. Allebest said. “We began to sell the joy of chess and the community more than just top players and news of top players. “In 2020, the site began to host tournaments with online influencers who are not proficient in chess but have a large following among young people. These include xQc, a professional video-game player and streamer; Ludwig, an e-sports streamer; MoistCr1TiKal, another streamer and commentator; and Mr. Beast, a 24-year-old YouTube sensation with 147 million subscribers.
Chess.com is hiring students to manage their social media presence. The students were encouraged to be rude and funny and create memes, Mr. Allebest said. A recent blog post on the site is titled “Why chess sucks” and offered as the main reason, “I always lose!”
The site’s Instagram account features short, unsettling videos, including the usual appearance of a bearded man in a puffy green pawn costume, who in one trip travels over a power line. Joker takes the pawn.
Botez Gambit
Soon, various online chess personalities have emerged.
Levy Rozman, 27, is an international master and charming, charismatic commentator better known as GothamChess; Mr. Allebest describes him as “the chess prophet’s spokesman for 14- to 25-year-olds.” Grandmaster GMHikaru has 1.91 million YouTube followers. Alexandra Botez, 28, another chess celebrity on Twitch and YouTube, got a certain claim to fame: Once, while streaming the match, she blundered into losing her queen and reacted with endearing, bemused shock that made the gaffe look cool. Accidentally losing your queen is now known as the Botez Gambit.
Mr. Post, a freshman at the University of Colorado, said he was drawn to the “clip” — a TikTok video by GothmanChess — when he was “bored.”
That was in early February; now, he plays every day, including sometimes in class. And he himself is a chess influencer. At a fraternity event, he said, he asked a frat brother, “‘Yo, are you good at chess?'”
“He said, ‘Let’s play,’ and then the other guy said, ‘I’m rude,’ and it was like a domino effect,” Mr. Post said.
Mittens for D4
Chess.com allows users to play against other people of their own skill level or against computer programs of various levels, including AI opponents who have names and personalities and can be outspoken.
Fabigi, described by Chess.com as “a hard-working Italian American plumber,” is a progressive beginner. Boshi, described as a long-haired human with a reptilian body, plays at the beginner level and is “everyone’s favorite dinosaur sidekick,” according to Chess.com’s description.
But the mother of all Chess.com bots, introduced only in January, is Mittens, an anime-esque tabby cat with big, sad-looking green eyes. Mittens is advertised by Chess.com as chess rating 1 – the worst. In reality, Mittens is a stone cold killer with a sadistic streak.
Mittens is made with world-class skill and is impossible to lose against the world’s top grandmasters. Mittens played slowly, appearing to give the enemy a chance while muttering strange and obnoxious taunts. (“Meow, I’m Mittens, destroy the king.”)
“We’re strong enough to beat almost every human player in the world, but not fast enough,” said Mike Klein, head of chess at ChessKid.com, which is part of the Chess.com company.
In January, 40 million games were played against Mittens, which Slate described in a headline at the time as “an evil cat bot that destroys players’ souls.”
End of the Game
Mr. Klein has been traveling the country trying to convince schools to include chess in the curriculum. He says that chess is good for the brain, but he admits that the scientific studies that have been done, linking chess with better performance on standardized tests, “are either old enough or they don’t have a good control group or they don’t have a large enough sample size. .”
Whether chess offers anything more valuable than other online games is not clear, said Dr. Michael Rich, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Digital Wellness Lab, which studies the health aspects of using technology. It all depends, he said, whether people have played with patience, and learning, or just for quick digital thrills.
Some teachers complain that chess is more of a distraction than a learning tool. “He plays constantly, throughout the school, and it’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t change anything and just plays chess,” an anonymous school teacher said of the student in a post on Reddit, where several threads have appeared on the subject. Mastery appears as an afterthought, the teacher writes: “The only thing … is everything really bad? It’s really terrible.”
Mrs. Schwartz, a high school student in San Francisco, said he mostly avoids playing games in class and says it benefits his brain. “Chess is a smart game,” he said.
His mother, Emily Stegner-Schwartz, agreed. “I’d rather they play chess than, whether it’s a game, Jewel Crusher or Candy Land,” he said, referring to the game Candy Crush. Online chess “is to chess what pickleball is to tennis,” she said.
His son, Hugh, a high school senior, can’t remember what he first played on Chess.com earlier this year — a friend, maybe? “I don’t know, it’s weird,” he said. Now he plays twice a day. And if there is a corporate strategy to catch them, does it really matter?
“Everyone is fooling around on social media these days,” he said. “Chess isn’t the worst thing to manipulate.”
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