Advances in 2023 is one of the oldest games in the world played on a 17-year-old site: Chess.com. The site, which allows people to take lessons, solve puzzles, and compare with computers or other players, broke its record with 7 million active members in one day on December 31. Last Friday, the number jumped to 10 million. Interest is overwhelming the site’s servers.
Progress shows no signs of slowing down. Fueled by renewed interest in the game due to recent scandals and TikTok’s performance, traffic has “rebounded” since early December, according to the Chess.com blog. All but five of the days in January set new user site records. And the Chess.com app has risen to the top of the popular section of Apple’s App Store.
That’s even worse than when the Covid-19 pandemic pushed people into their homes and into the spotlight. And it’s more hype than time The Queen’s Gambit they enticed viewers to catch their attractions. “Honestly, this is troubling,” Chess.com said in a post Monday evening. “It’s never been a very exciting time to be a chess fan, and that’s why it’s a very frustrating time for things to go wrong.”
This website, loved by beginners, amateurs, and professional players, is growing with a new group of chess enthusiasts, and is driven by a sudden push to improve chess, a fake viral saga, and short videos. which makes the game playable for everyone.
“December and January have been incredibly big, in terms of chess analytics,” says Levy Rozman, a chess expert who produces content on Twitch and YouTube as GothamChess. “It’s based on the growth of the entire last year, and I’m getting one month.”
Unlike the plague or The Queen’s Gambit, there is nothing interesting about chess. But interest began to grow when the game hit the headlines in late 2022, when world champion Magnus Carlsen accused his rival Hans Moke Niemann of cheating. A review by Chess.com found that Niemann may have cheated more than 100 times in online games. The revelation was accompanied by a far-fetched theory about how Niemann may have used a sex toy to give him a hint of success in the game. Soon, non-chess people began to pay attention.
Then, in November, footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi took the internet by storm when they each posted a picture of the pair battling it out in chess as part of a Louis Vuitton ad campaign. In December, more than 10 million people watched a video from ChessBase India on YouTube of Carlsen playing in the World Blitz Chess Championship.
Rozman started posting short videos on TikTok and YouTube that same month, and says he’s seen his subscriber base grow by hundreds of thousands of users. #ChessTok on TikTok has over 2 billion views. These short videos, combined with powerful algorithms on the video sharing platform, could be attracting new viewers who couldn’t stomach 30 minutes of chess. Rozman said: “It looks like we are worried.” “And there’s a lot of appeal. It’s not this boring, elite game.”
