Trending in 2023 is one of the world’s oldest games played on a 17-year-old website: Chess.com. The site, which lets people take lessons, solve puzzles, and match up against computers or other players, broke its own record with 7 million active members in a single day on December 31. Last Friday, that number jumped to 10 million. The enthusiasm is overloading the site’s servers.
The progress shows no sign of slowing. Spurred by new interest in the game thanks to a recent scandal and TikTok trends, traffic has “nearly doubled” since early December, according to Chess.com’s blog. All but five days in January have set new sitewide records for active users. And the Chess.com app has risen on the popular game section of Apple’s App Store.
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The website, beloved by novice, amateur, and professional players, is surging with a new cohort of chess enthusiasts, and they’re driven by a sudden push to make chess cool, a viral cheating saga, and a surge in short-form video that makes the game digestible for anyone.
“December and January have been terrifyingly huge, in terms of chess analytics,” says Levy Rozman, a chess master who makes content on Twitch and YouTube as GothamChess. “It’s taking the growth of basically the entire past year, and getting it in a month.”
Unlike during the pandemic or The Queen’s Gambit, there’s no one factor driving chess intrigue. But interest began ticking up as the game made headlines in the fall of 2022, when world champion Magnus Carlsen accused his opponent Hans Moke Niemann of cheating. A review by Chess.com found that Niemann may have cheated more than 100 times in online games. This revelation accompanied an extremely bizarre theory about how Niemann may have used a sex toy to give him hints about the best moves in the match. Soon, people outside of the traditional chess world started tuning in.
