What's up with chess?

What is the recipe for (re) popularizing something that seems old-fashioned, long-gone and boring? You put it in a Netflix series.

This had happened with the mini-series The queen’s gambit, which reminded us of the game of chess. The mini-series presents a young orphan woman (Beth Harmon), who becomes a famous chess player, while she fights against her drug and alcohol addiction.

It’s very interesting to notice how, after the appearance of this mini-series on Netflix and the sudden blow-up of the show (being no. 1 in trending in 60 different countries), the number of chess players also exploded worldwide.

Chess has become an effective way to make time pass by and a coping mechanism in the pandemic. After the rising popularity of the chess game, it stopped being a boring game and associated with a category of people not a category of a certain age. So, the popular streamers started collaborating with professional chess players, to increase their views and reach the top of the Twitch platform (which happens). The best example is Hikaru Nakamura (#1 blitz player, #4 rapid player), which managed to gain 10.000 constant viewers and recurring streams.

*The largest website dedicated to chess, namely Chess.com, took advantage of the success of The Queen's Gambit, adding bots of different levels of difficulty, named Beth Harmon, to attract players, giving them the chance to play against the main character in the miniseries. At the end of 2020, Chess.com recorded over 125 million matches played and over 5 million active accounts, an increase of over 60% compared to the pre-QueensGambit period.

What do you think about chess? Boring or entertaining? Did you also learn how to play chess in this quarantine, or did you not let yourself be led by the wave of new players and hype?

Don't forget to follow us on instagram at @themagateen! :)

editorial: Maria Angele

DTP: Alexandra Zanef

translation: Ioana Mătăsaru

design: Alexandra Zanef