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Comment by beforeolives | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the revival attributed mostly to The Queen's Gambit being released on Netflix?

Not just that. Chess.com also saw a huge surge when Covid began.

Since the Lichess database is open, you can see the effect of both covid and QG on the number of games played. But the growth has been exponential for years. Check out the first two plots on this page (notice the log scale):

https://github.com/Paul566/chessOpeningStats

Definitely not. I remember watching chess games on Twitch when the pandemic started last spring and being surprised how popular chess had gotten.

It's chess streaming becoming mature at the same time a global pandemic forced people indoors, combined with TQG.

Not really. The revival for me was due to agadmator on youtube but obviously I only started seeing his videos once they were popular and I dont know the cause of that (other than the quality of the channel of course!)

But Queens Gambit did push chess to be even more popular.

With the top player in the world being a hunk, chess became a lot more palatable hobby. :)

Chess is the poster boy of the Lindy effect.

Queen's Gambit only got funded because the Netflix folks saw the boom happening in chess streaming before it. Pogchamps was probably the biggest single factor if you want to go looking for that. It's almost certainly why Netflix wrote the check. For anyone unfamiliar, Pogchamps is a tournament organized by chess.com that paired famous streamers with chess pros as coaches. It's genuinely some pretty fantastic content.

There's also pretty substantial evidence the later parts of the boom were fed by COVID.

I hate to burst your Twitch bubble but production started way before chess streaming took off:

"On March 19, 2019, Netflix gave the production a series order consisting of six episodes"

Chess streaming had gained critical mass before that, and as the sibling comment points out, there were a lot of conversations happening in relation to how chess was clearly gaining momentum, particularly on twitch, before the first actual pogchamps. I was more using Pogchamps as a placeholder term for referring to the overall boom of chess on twitch. That is definitely why Netflix funded it. I've been told this somewhat directly but can't elaborate further than that.

From these charts that that just isn't very convincing anymore:

https://socialblade.com/twitch/user/gmhikaru/monthly https://socialblade.com/twitch/user/chessbrah/monthly

And I say that as someone who was watching Hiarku on twitch in 2018 and even wrote long post on this site about why Chess is the fastest growing esport" in 2019. [ I seem to have lost which account I posted that under however, I maintain separate work accounts and suspect I posted that one one company time (oops!) ]

But looking back, I was over-optimistic, not about Chess' prospects as an esport, but about how much it had really grown given what happened when we saw a real boom from the pandemic, from xQc and pogchamps, and from the Queen's Gambit.

Pohchamps was in the making since 2018.

Do you have a source for that? Googling literally returns your own post here as the top result.

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