Why Is Chess So Popular Right Now?
A Netflix show, clever marketing, and a pandemic
When I first downloaded the Chess.com’s version of the Chess app on my phone, I played chess for about six hours a day for two days straight. Don’t get me wrong — I was absolutely terrible at it. I’m still not really great. I boast an Elo score of 550 in rapid, 10-minute games, and made very simple mistakes typical of beginners.
But it’s an incredible amount of fun to be able to play a game on my phone and have zero expectations attached. I play a lot of friends in daily games where we both have to play each other back in a day, but my calling card to getting better at chess has been the 10-minute games. They require my full attention for up to 20 minutes. Usually, I never just play one 10-minute game — if I play one, and lose horribly, my ego takes a hit. I develop an edge to prove myself on the next one. Naturally, when this happens during my lunch break, I have to usher in all my resources in self-control to stop myself.
I’m not the only person who’s getting really into playing chess. I started after being inspired by my roommate Samuel Sullivan, who is an elite chess player, and by a classmate who doesn’t pay attention in law school classes and just plays chess during lectures and swings A’s by learning the whole course towards the end of the semester.
I also had a student last school year who gave me a lot of issues behaviorally and who could shift the entire tone of the class the moment he called someone a bad name — but he was really into chess, so we built a better relationship after I had him play chess during his lunch period. He checkmated me in four moves during our first game, but all the next ones grew significantly more competitive.
I’ve posted about some of my chess games for fun on my Instagram story, and I have had three friends respond to those Instagram stories challenging me to a game on Chess.com. I’m surprised not only because of the sheer volume of peers who seem to be into chess, but that it’s not exactly the people I expect — they weren’t the straight-A nerds in all AP classes and 4.0 GPAs, but regular people who are very intelligent in different respects, but not in the traditional academic sense.
I think there’s a lot of temptation to see chess as a direct correlation to intelligence, but studies on the role of chess in academic achievement are a bit more mixed. I mean, you certainly feel very smart after absolutely dominating an opponent in chess and feel not so smart when you failed to see an impending checkmate that seemed obvious in hindsight. But intelligence is much more layered than just chess, even if it does test your strategy skills.
Why chess is blowing up right now
Chess is a growing popular phenomenon not only for myself and many of my peers, but across the country.
Some of that booming popularity can be attributed to 2020 hit Netflix show, The Queen’s Gambit, but according to Matt Richtel at the New York Times, Chess.com has quietly had a very successful marketing campaign geared towards young adults and teenagers. Between February 2020 to February 2021, usage of Chess.com leaped from 1.5 million daily users to 4.5 million.
The company hired college students to manage its social media presence, but other factors also played into the app’s popularity, including sheer luck, COVID-19, a cheating scandal involving sex toys, and the popularity of grandmaster Magnus Carlsen.
One parent of a high school senior fully immersed in chess was actually happy that he was more absorbed by chess than he was by, say, Candy Crush. I happen to concur and find chess a better game for our young people than Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty.
A lot of Twitch streamers have also started playing chess and entertained their viewers by doing so. Popular amateur chess tournament, PogChamps, which is hosted by Chess.com, regularly has over 100,000 viewers, becoming one of the most watched tournaments on Twitch.
For all these factors, chess is reaching a level of popularity it hasn’t seen since the 1972 World Chess Championships, which featured a famous match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, an American versus a Soviet at the peak of the Cold War.
Takeaways
To me, the biggest appeal of Chess.com’s version of chess is that it’s adaptive. You play people who are on your level, and you are constantly on a journey of self-improvement. You improve your score as you get better at chess, and play against tougher opponents.
You are rarely getting dominated every time or obliterating the opponent — playing against another player at your level means it’s good, close competition.
But like all things, chess is best in moderation. There are more important things, and despite chess being a more productive game and distraction than most, we have to remember that at the end of the day, chess is still just a game.