The second tournament is running through September 6 and features streamers like xQc and even Hafthor Julius Bjornsson – the actor who played The Mountain in “Game of Thrones.” The event was so popular with both the streamers and fans – at one point more than 150,000 people were watching – that a second Pogchamps was immediately scheduled. In June, 16 of Twitch’s top streamers played in a round robin chess tournament after being coached by a number of world-class chess players, including Nakamura. This popularity culminated in a chess tournament called Pogchamps. “Hikaru is literally the discipline in action,” comments Devin Nash, a popular Twitch analyst. These games illustrate for the new fans and top streamers the skills, cunning and joy that are rapidly coming to be associated with chess. These collaborations with celebrities of the gaming world have been a huge boost to chess’s popularity as Nakamura plays games against these streamers while blindfolded or foregoing the use of the queen. Nakamura has attracted the interest of other massively popular streamers with millions of followers – xQc, forsen, Nymm and the late Reckful, to name a few. Viewers on Twitch have discovered a profound interest in learning the fundamental mechanics of a board game from the sixth century. Nakamura is a great player and a jovial person, but there are many thousands of modern, high-production video games being played by charismatic and skilled streamers on Twitch. Andreas Kontokanis via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA A surprising fit
Hikaru Nakamura is a top-ranked grandmaster and, more recently, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch. Why is this flood of interest in chess happening now? At times, over 45,000 viewers have watched a single game. In 2020, those fans have already watched an astonishing 9.95 million hours of Nakamura’s channel. At first, he was relatively unnoticed, but in 2019, when he started dedicating upwards of 30 hours per week to streaming, Nakamura became known as GMHikaru to his growing fanbase online. In addition to his traditional competitive career, in 2015, Nakamura began streaming chess on Twitch.
chess champion and a top 10 ranked chess player in the world. At the time of writing this, viewers have consumed close to 38 million hours of chess in 2020 alone.Īt the helm of this explosion is Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. Then, a mere 59 people were watching chess streams at any given time.
Since 2015, chess viewership has experienced exponential growth on Twitch. It now hosts tens of thousands of creators who broadcast live to a global audience of around 17.5 million viewers a day. In recent years, Twitch has grown to become the cultural hub of the gaming community. is a live-video streaming website that was started in 2011 as a platform for users to watch other people play video games. AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File Chess explodes on is a streaming website where millions of people watch content ranging from video games to conversation to chess. What is emerging is an unexpectedly good pairing between chess and a digital generation that is showing how influential gamers can be. The current renaissance in chess is happening at the confluence of livestreaming technology, video game culture and one grandmaster’s exceptional skills as both a chess player and entertainer. 6, Twitch and are hosting a tournament, called Pogchamps, where some of the most popular gaming streamers in the world compete in a chess tournament with US$50,000 on the line. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is edited onto the Mona Lisa herself.įrom Aug. While viewers eagerly await Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game.
As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a livestreaming website called.
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