Mr. Llada said it was too soon to measure the full impact of “The Queen’s Gambit” on chess, but said it was already comparable to the buzz usually generated around world championships, held every two years. Some matches, like the championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky played during the Cold War, “gave birth to a whole new generation of millions of chess fans,” Mr. Llada said.
“The chess community fell in love with the series because it successfully portrays different aspects of chess in all its richness: It’s easy enough to be fun to play, but also complex enough to pose a challenge,” he said. “It is nerdy, but also cool and fashionable. It is intensively competitive, but full of interesting, creative and colorful characters.”
Streaming platforms like Twitch have also had skyrocketing viewership of chess games.
From March through August, people watched 41.2 million hours of chess on Twitch, four times as many hours as in the previous six months, according to the analytics website SullyGnome. Last month, people watched 4.2 million hours of chess, compared with 2.4 million the same month last year.
In June, an amateur chess tournament called PogChamps was briefly the top-viewed stream on Twitch, with 63,000 people watching at once, SullyGnome said.
And membership in chess organizations, such as the U.S. Chess Federation, the governing body for chess competition in the U.S., is also on the rise.
“This month, we’ve had our first bump in membership since the pandemic hit, and we are hearing from our members that many of them are renewing or rejoining specifically because of the series,” said Daniel Lucas, a senior official at the federation.
