Trends in 2023 is one of the world’s oldest games played on the 17-year-old website: Chess.com. The site, which allows people to take lessons, solve puzzles and compete against the computer or other players, broke its own record with 7 million active members in just one day on December 31 Last Friday, that number rose to 10 million. Enthusiasm is overloading the site’s servers.
Progress shows no signs of slowing down. Fueled by renewed interest in the game thanks to a recent scandal and TikTok trends, traffic has “nearly doubled” since early December, according to Chess.com blog. All but five days in January set a new site-wide record for active users. And the Chess.com app has appeared on the popular games section of Apple’s App Store.
That’s a bigger boom than when the Covid-19 pandemic pushed people into their homes and onto their screens. And it’s more exaggerated when Queen’s Gambit attract followers to get their recruits. “Honestly, this sucks,” Chess.com said in a post Monday night. “There’s never been a more exciting time to be a chess fan, but it’s also why service shutdowns are so frustrating.”
The site, loved by newbies, amateurs and professionals alike, is on the rise with a new group of chess enthusiasts, and they are suddenly motivated to make chess fun, a The viral cheat story and the proliferation of short-form videos make the game easily digestible for anyone.
“December and January are terrifyingly huge times, in terms of chess analysis,” said Levy Rozman, a chess master and content creator on Twitch and YouTube. Gotham Chess. “It basically took the growth of the past year and hit it in a month.”
Not like during a pandemic or Queen’s Gambit, there isn’t a single factor driving the chess plot. But interest began to grow when the game came to prominence in the fall of 2022, when world champion Magnus Carlsen accused his opponent Hans Moke Niemann of cheating. A review by Chess.com suggests that Niemann may have cheated more than 100 times in online games. This revelation comes with an extreme bizarre theory about how Niemann may have used sex toys to suggest him the best moves in the match. Soon, people outside the traditional chess world began to tune in.
Then in November the greats Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi broke the internet when they once posted a picture of the two of them playing chess as part of an advertising campaign for Louis Vuitton. In December, more than 10 million people watched a videotapes from ChessBase India on Carlsen’s YouTube competing at the World Blitz Championships.
Rozman began posting shorter videos on TikTok and YouTube that same month, and said he’s seen his subscriber base grow to hundreds of thousands of users. #ChessTok on TikTok has over 2 billion views. These shorter clips, combined with powerful algorithms on the video-sharing platform, can attract new viewers who won’t sit through a 30-minute chess explanation. “It looks like we’re unraveling the mysteries of chess,” said Rozman. “And many more interesting things. This is not this dull, elite game.
