A galaxy of chess stars has begun gathering in Mahabalipuram for the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad that kicks off on Friday. And given the conscious effort that has been made to promote the event – posters and hoardings of the Olympiad have been ubiquitous in Chennai and its adjoining districts in recent weeks – some of the top players might find greater attention than they would come to expect.
One of them is Dutch Grandmaster (GM) Anish Giri,
A galaxy of chess stars has begun gathering in Mahabalipuram for the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad that kicks off on Friday. And given the conscious effort that has been made to promote the event – posters and hoardings of the Olympiad have been ubiquitous in Chennai and its adjoining districts in recent weeks – some of the top players might find greater attention than they would come to expect.
One of them is Dutch Grandmaster (GM) Anish Giri, a world No 10 who has not allowed his FIDE rating to slip below 2700 for close to a decade now. It is a measure of consistency that all top players strive for. But until two years ago, Giri is likely to himself admit that he wasn’t known by many beyond the chess community, illustrative of the mind game’s status amongst the general public.
Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, though, chess has gained in popularity among younger audiences in particular. On Twitch – an American live streaming gaming platform – the number of average daily viewers for chess rose gradually from around 1,000 in March 2020 and hit a peak of around 55,000 in February 2021. While the numbers have plateaued out since then, they are still much higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The top players did not only take to online chess seamlessly but discovered that live streaming could be a way of engaging with their followers and attracting newer members. The 28-year-old Giri, for instance, began his YouTube channel after Covid and has gained 174K subscribers since.
There are more prominent examples like Japanese-American Hikaru Nakamura, whose earnings are estimated to be $50 million by Madrid-based newspaper El Pais. He is said to be the wealthiest chess player in the world right now, and most of his earnings come through streaming his games on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. He has 1.32 million subscribers on YouTube and around the same number on Twitch, where he had just 400,000 followers at the beginning of the pandemic.
The release of The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix miniseries that charts the life of a female chess prodigy while dealing with alcohol and drug addiction, in October 2020 was another game-changer for chess. Within four weeks, it became the streaming platform’s most-watched fictional miniseries.
“It (streaming) has helped to bring chess to a younger audience, which is very important in the long run,” said Giri during a virtual interaction on Wednesday ahead of the 44th Chess Olympiad. “When I used to get recognised earlier, which was not often, it was mostly by people of (Bobby) Fischer’s generation. Now I am recognised mainly by people of my age. They know chess from streams and from YouTube. It is important to bring that audience in.
“It will be a slow process. It is not like the chess landscape has changed overnight, but some online platforms like chess24 and chess.com are growing and becoming much stronger. They are coming up with events of their own like (Magnus) Carlsen’s Champions Chess Tour by chess24. The rise of online following has been a great development for chess.”
According to Giri, what the internet has also done is made learning chess “more accessible” to a wider range of countries, thereby bridging the gap between the top chess-playing nations and the lesser ones.
“Previously, you needed access to books. Most players came from the Soviet Union and the books would be in Russian. If you wanted to learn, you needed to get those books and translate them. It was hard to learn chess quickly. The transition has happened thanks to the internet,” said Giri, whose Russian mother and Nepalese-Indian father settled down in Netherlands in 2008. “Players have come in from places where there was no chess. Like Carlsen from Norway. Due to the internet, he had access to databases and training material right from his childhood. We see top players now from random countries. Chess is booming in more countries and becoming more diverse. For example, Uzbekistan and Iran have some very promising youngsters.”
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