It was bound to happen: Chess is having a moment.
The Queen’s Gambit, a 1983 novel about an orphan girl who becomes a chess prodigy in her adulthood by Walter Tevis, is now a hit miniseries on Netflix. Chess provides both the setting and the plot of the story, and the writers and directors take the game seriously. Bruce Pandolfini is a legendary chess consultant, and he advised Tevis on the book and then played an even bigger role in crafting the movie.
The result is a chess movie in which the actors not only seem like real chess players, but the moves make sense, and the games also provide some actual drama to the chess-knowledgeable.
For everyone else, the movie seems to be piquing interest — and peaking interest: Google searches for “chess” hit a five-year high in the show’s first week, according to Google Trends.
Real chess players may be playing an even bigger role in making this a heyday for the game of kings. Specifically, there’s a chess grandmaster who’s youngish, cool, and now streaming.
Hikaru Nakamura is 32 and has been a chess grandmaster for most of his life. But recently, he cemented his standing as the greatest video-game grandmaster, signing on to a major international esports team called TSM. His arena is Chess.com.
Chess.com has been allowing strangers to play one another for years, and it has teamed up with Twitch, a service that allows gamers to stream their games online — broadcasting their video games to spectators around the world, complete with video and audio from the player. In effect, the best chess player in America is now a video-game star.
This has driven tons of young people to get interested in chess, and they can compete online. Professionals at other video games are even playing chess tournaments on Twitch, all because of Nakamura’s influence.
Chess.com has seen its registered users triple since 2016, with the pandemic and its lockdowns driving more people to find online stimulation that may actually be intellectually stimulating.
