Bringing an Economic Revolution to Chess | Hacker News Reader

Bringing an Economic Revolution to Chess

marginalrevolution.com

47 pointsvenmul18 comments

Chess is actually experiencing a popularity boom thanks to Hikaru Nakamura (if we have to credit one player).

Amateur chess on Twitch is. Though then maybe it's XQC, an Overwatch player who plays chess at the standard of a decent six year old, who deserves the credit.

The reinvention of elite chess online, which is what this article talks about, is definitely spearheaded by Carlsen.

A big recent thread about that is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537774

Perhaps I'm counting this wrong, but Chess24 tournament coverage gets 10x or 20x more views than a Hikaru stream gets on any given day. For example today's Chessable Masters video has 50k+ views, yesterday's 80k+. Hikaru's stream will get 2k views on a random good day. I see numbers bigger than that on http://analysis.sesse.net/ whenever it's live!

There's no doubt that blitz - and people like Hikaru and Chessbrahs explicitly tapping into the e-sports potential - is driving a lot of interest, but it still seems like real tournament play, coupled with in-depth commentary and analysis, is very popular. I also don't think we should underestimate the impact of the explosion of content out of St Louis and Atlanta (which again, get higher views on every educational video than Hikaru gets on his streams).

A tournament with the top chess players in the world and live commentary by experts is not comparable to a chess stream by Hikaru playing blitz against random opponents daily.

If you take total viewer-hours Hikaru is bringing in far more than any top tournaments

Hikaru’s popularity has skyrocketed over the last couple of months, averaging 16k concurrent viewers in the past month: https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru/statistics

How much did it have in the past?

> Perhaps I'm counting this wrong, but Chess24 tournament coverage gets 10x or 20x more views than a Hikaru stream gets on any given day.

First of all, in the last tournament, Chess24 coverage barely hit 2k viewers on stream while Hikaru's stream had around 50k if I remember correctly.

> For example today's Chessable Masters video has 50k+ views, yesterday's 80k+.

Comparing videos against live stream views does not seem right. Many people would watch recordings because of the time zones and availability. I think it might be fair to compare the number of followers: Hikaru has 416k right now on Twitch and 282k on YouTube, St. Louis Chess Club has only 282k. PogChamps finals (which Hikaru is the host of) had 85k live viewers (https://twitter.com/chesscom/status/1274141325106065409).

> Hikaru's stream will get 2k views on a random good day.

This is simply incorrect. Maybe it has been true a long time ago, but I don't know if he had below 5k at any day lately (and he's been streaming every day for 60+ days or so). Here are the stats: https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru. Average is 13k over the last week and 16.8k over the last month.

> I also don't think we should underestimate the impact of the explosion of content out of St Louis and Atlanta (which again, get higher views on every educational video than Hikaru gets on his streams).

This is also incorrect. Let's take a look at the St. Louis Chess Club videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub/videos. There are many 2k and sub-2k educational videos (even sub-1k in some cases) and just by looking at the numbers it seems like the absolute majority of educational videos are not even close to the average viewers on live Hikaru streams for the past month. Tournaments are obviously different.

To be fair, I agree with the importance of tournaments and in-depth commentary, analysis and educational videos. I just want to point out that the analysis you provide is not correct.

Tournaments are great and super exciting, but the general problem with chess is that most people who are below 1800 ELO can not relate and the content creators in the past were not generally interested in explaining the concepts to a wide auditory. Simply understanding what the commentators are saying would require an enormous amount of work for an average interested person.

Hikaru, on the other hand, makes it accessible for most players and, undoubtably, that's why there are more people interested in seeing him play blitz with random people than seeing GMs and super GMs comment Carlsen match in Chess24 tournament. I'm glad it's changing fast, but Chess24 tournaments should be grateful to Hikaru instead making a drama because he had more viewers and trying to stop him from streaming the tournament. Funny enough, that was after explicitly allowing him to use the channel to stream the tournament. If it wasn't for him, I doubt Chess24 would even get their 2k viewers on Twitch for the last tournament.

Both casual chess and tournaments are skyrocketing in popularity lately and I couldn't be more excited about Chess becoming really popular, I just think it's clear that casual chess has been the driver.

Thanks for the corrections and showing me how to run the numbers on Twitch correctly - I was just looking at the figures on the past broadcasts page which presumably mean offline views.

I will still hold on to my curmudgeonly grumpiness about this trend but clearly it's valid and real.

And online. Online is a big deal.

With online, the fact that your opponent has totally screwball social skills isn't relevant.

And Antonio Radić (Agadmator). I started watching him first, then found Nakamura about a year ago. It's amazing to see how popular it has evolved to become over the last 12 months.

Agadmator is just absolutely fantastic. I love it when he says "and it is at this move ## that we have a completely new game".

Oddly enough, I find them surprisingly easy to fall asleep to! (In a good way!)

Carlsen has done far more to popularize chess than Nakamura. He launched a chess app in 2014. He is the first world champion to regularly play online and accept challenges to blitz games. He has hosted online tournaments with record breaking prizes

I think Hikaru being American is the main reason for the boom.

Chess has been on the rise in the last 10-15 years and a lot of it was thanks to the internet and social media. I got into chess 15 years ago after playing on a defunct site called instantchess.com which had a live screensaver with chess matches on their site. Since then plenty of chess apps added to the effect and lastly the social media gave it another boost for the masses. It’s a great game and more popularity will never hurt. I wonder what else will make a comeback next

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