How the Covid crisis and Netflix revolutionized chess
2020 was a memorable year for chess. Between the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit and the global pandemic pausing in-person play, the game had to reinvent itself. Let’s take a look at how this time-honored game became one of 2020’s biggest trends.
The Beth Harmon effect
It is undeniable that the immense success of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit put chess back at center stage.
The impact was clear:
- Chess boards sales increased 215% on eBay, causing huge stock outs for Christmas
- Traffic to online chess game websites exploded (+ 50% on Chess.com)
- The novel “Queen’s Gambit” at the origin of the series became “New York Time’s Best Seller’’ 37 years after its publication.
Entering the digital age
Computers have long played an important role in the life of the chess player, a role that continues to grow with the progress of artificial intelligence. According to legendary world champion Garry Kasparov: “It’s an important lesson that our original visions are often far off the mark when faced with the pragmatic results machines produce. Our intelligent machines don’t have to imitate us to surpass our performance. They don’t have to be perfect to be useful, only better than a human at a particular task, whether it’s playing chess.”
In 2020, the global pandemic forced the chess world to reinvent itself, replacing face-to-face events with online ones. This had several impacts:
Social media platforms adapted the tournaments to offer rapid games that lasted an average of fifteen minutes. Unlike traditional chess where players have several hours of reflection, an action-packed game of fast chess is exciting to watch and the format generated a lot of interest.
In parallel, significant cash prizes were offered to attract the best players on those new online chess tournaments ($1.5M for the 2021 Grand Chess Tour).
Boosted by these new star players, audiences for online chess events exploded. The Grand Chess Tour, a competition that brings together the best players in the world including four-time world champion Magnus Carlsen, recorded live views of 285k+ people at its peak in January 2021, generating even more interest in the game. The tournament also benefited from live online chess broadcasting where high-level players explain each move for the audience in real time. This commentary allows the fans to go beyond their role of a mere spectator.
This success revealed an opportunity for esports teams. The American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura (world number 1 in the Elo ranking in blitz) who was already very popular on Twitch (50k+ people regularly followed his live streams), became the first chess player to sign with the esports giant TSM. In his wake, other players followed, such as French female master Andreea Navrotescu who joined Team Vitality in February 2021.
The success of Chess creators
This infatuation for chess prompted the public to seek out ways to improve at the game. After all, playing the game can be frustrating if you keep losing. Educational chess content that was accessible to everyone, at every level, saw massive success in 2020. A success that the world champion Magnus Carlsen took advantage of by buying the very popular website chess24 and the NewsInChess magazine, building a real empire.
Other creators have been able to take advantage of this affinity for chess and saw their community grow. For example, the Youtuber Agadmator exceeded one million subscribers and hit 383M views.
Live broadcasts are also very successful. On Twitch, the French Kevin Bordi, known as Blitzstream, has 100k+ subscribers and hosts the best French players on his shows, including world number 4 Maxime Vachier Lagrave.
The impact is global. In January 2021, 18.3M hours of chess videos were watched on the platform Twitch.
To a lesser extent, a large majority of players in the chess world have initiated a digital shift. For example, the very dynamic Corsica Chess League (which has trained more than 50k children in 20 years) has started Facebook Live chess broadcasts intended for beginners. The sessions have attracted thousands of people every week. It is also interesting to note that Corsica is the only French region to offer a weekly chess program on TV.
Jellysmack’s analysis
At Jellysmack, we have developed a proprietary tool, JellyPulse, that scans large amounts of data to identify trends and spot promising creators.
One of its functions is to analyze millions of videos posted on YouTube. Using our own technology, we’ve gathered fascinating data around the evolution of the chess trend.
The first observation is that the number of videos and channels related to chess has exploded in 2020, going from 32k to 80k+ and 13k to 24k respectively in 2 years.
Likewise, the number of YouTube channels about chess has doubled since 2019, clearly showing the renewed interest for the age-old game.
The craze for chess can also be observed by the number of likes per video, going from 32k in 2019 to 65k in 2020.
Focusing only on the year 2020, one cannot deny the propellant effect of The Queen’s Gambit. We also discovered that the number of likes per week for videos related to chess increased to 2M+ at week 43 and never went below again. Not surprisingly, week 43 corresponds to October 23, the date the series premiered on Netflix.
The same observation can be made by analyzing the views per week of videos related to chess, a boom appears in week 43 and the number even exceeds 60M in week 46.
Google trends seems to confirm this analysis. While only 88 words related to chess were a top trend in 2019, this value doubled in 2020 with the word “chess” reaching the 3rd rank and the combination of words “the Queen’s gambit” reaching the first rank in November 2020, one month after the release of the series.
2020 definitely set the stage for the revival of chess and its shift to the digital world. Will 2021 be even more promising? Who knows, maybe we will see a real-life Beth Harmon step onto the scene.
Think you could be Jellysmack’s first Chess Creator? Contact us at hello@jellysmack.com
