When discussing chess’s big surge in popularity in 2020, we usually point to the pandemic and The Queen’s Gambit, while perhaps PogChamps deserves a place in the same sentence. What do the numbers say? Let’s look at two periods: before The Queen’s Gambit and after.
On 22 October 2020, a day before The Queen’s Gambit was launched, Chess.com had 44 million members. Since March of that year, the figure had grown by 12 million in less than eight months, an average pace of about 1.3 million a month. This “pandemic growth” was almost three times as fast as before Covid. On 23 March 2021, when Beth Harmon had spent five months inspiring people to pick up a chess set, Chess.com boasted 61 million members, an increase of 17 million, or 3.4 million a month. This growth was more than six times faster than before the pandemic. By June 2021 the effect of The Queen’s Gambit was fading. While global lockdowns were lifted Chess.com continued to grow, adding roughly 1.7 million members per month until the end of the summer of 2022.
If we view the first months of the pandemic as the first wave, The Queen’s Gambit was the second, leading to the biggest surge in chess popularity since Fischer-Spassky in 1972. By then we had seen the peak of the chess mania, right? Wrong. A completely unexpected third wave started in December 2022 – a month that broke the previous record of January 2021 for new registrations. As 4.6 million new followers joined in that single month, the site broke the magic barrier of one hundred million registered members, only 14 months after reaching 50 million. (Ten months later, in October 2023, the site would reach 150 million.) January and February 2023 smashed that single-month record, with 8.9 million new registrations for both. After that, things started slowing down again, but March (7.5 million) and April (5.7 million) were still higher than any month during the The Queen’s Gambit period.
“Honestly, the first two weeks, in late November 2022, I didn’t think it was legitimate traffic,” said Chess.com Systems Architect Igor Grinchenko.
I thought it was malicious; it had to be. Traffic went up 10 per cent every day, and the same for incoming web requests, bandwidth, load on the server and everything else. I said, “Guys, someone is attacking us.” Because I know our flows, I know our ups and downs, off-peaks and on-peaks, and I can trace them. There is also seasonality and stuff. Then I started looking at deeper metrics that cannot be affected by malicious traffic – let’s say the number of games played, the number of users online. And then I realised: this is legitimate. And we have to do something about it.
At its peak, Chess.com was accommodating over ten million active users on a single day. That spiked on 20 January 2023, when traffic on Chess.com had nearly doubled since the beginning of December 2022. On 3 February a record 403,000 members joined in 24 hours, over 200,000 more than at the peak of The Queen’s Gambit. Over a billion games were played for the first time in a month. A stunning 42.4 million games were played on a single day on 2 March 2023 (including games against bots). Meanwhile, the Chess.com app briefly occupied #1 in many countries’ Top Free Games section of the iOS app store.
The boom was not just happening online. In April 2023 the Washington Post ran a story headlined “Teachers Nationwide are Flummoxed By Students’ New Chess Obsession”. A month later, CBS Bay Area wrote that chess was “sweeping classrooms across the country”. It wasn’t limited to the US either: the Dutch newspaper Het Parool ran a similar story noting that children were suddenly playing chess fanatically in school canteens and that Amsterdam chess clubs were facing waiting lists for teenage members.
The American entertainment website Polygon, which focuses on video games and popular culture, noted that the chess mania was happening suddenly: “Schools that don’t have chess clubs are rushing to start them. Teachers are confused but pleased to see a wholesome new hobby. Administrators are struggling with how chess is disrupting classrooms at times, and are blaming it for attention issues and drama in classrooms and hallways. Can you ban chess? Some schools have reportedly had to.”
The sudden rise in popularity, particularly among teens, was reflected by Chess.com’s age metrics. The site experienced the biggest growth from players aged between 13 and 17 years old: 549,000 of them visited Chess.com in January and February 2023, more than twice as many as in the two months prior. The second-fastest-growing age group in the same period was 18-to-24-year-olds. Chess was booming, and the Chess.com servers were struggling. More often than not, members were getting served a disappointing 503 error when visiting the site: database overload. “It’s hard to explain how painful it was for me as CEO,” Allebest said.
One of our developers would always talk about underwater stones, meaning you can’t see the problems until it’s too late . . . There was a moment when somebody crashed our server because they pasted the entire script of the Bee Movie in the chat window of a game. When it came into the server and was sent back to everybody watching this particular game, it crashed the whole site because of too much data. We didn’t think someone was going to paste in that much text. You know, things like that, over and over and over again. Chess.com purchased $2 million of new hardware – web servers, database servers, a new live chess server, load balancers and additional service machines. After a few weeks of setting up, separating database tables, sharding databases (a way to spread the load) and other ways of optimising, things were under control again.
The first two waves of popularity in 2020 were easy to explain: the pandemic (with PogChamps) and The Queen’s Gambit. But where did that third, and by far biggest wave, come from? Well, in this case, it was a combination of multiple individual events happening in a short period that all helped boost the popularity of chess to stratospheric heights. Some happened in late 2022 and have already been mentioned in this book, such as the Carlsen–Niemann affair, the Instagram picture with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and the Chessboxing event. And then, in January 2023, a furry, meowing phenomenon contributed even more. When Chess.com launched, on 18 May 2007, the only possibility to play chess on the site had been against the computer. Many years later, that remains one of the most popular activities for its members, partly because of some added fun elements. After Chess.com acquired one of the world’s strongest chess engines, Komodo, in May 2018, the company started using it to create computer “characters” to play against. Among those fun bots you could challenge were the “holiday bots” (Santa, Holly, Dash, Eve and Powder), the “zombie bots” (Zombaru, Zombiachtchi, Zombiano and Zombanny), and the “fake billionaire bots” (Gill Bates, Melon Husk, Zark Muckerberg, Biff Jezos and Barron Wuffet).
On 1 January 2023, new bots were introduced, and one of them instantly became the biggest star in chess (well, for a few weeks at least). That was Mittens, the strongest among five cat bots – the others were Scaredy Cat, Angry Cat, Mr Grumpers and Catspurrov. Right from the start, Mittens – an avatar of a big-eyed, kind of sad-looking kitten boasting a silly rating of just one point – took all the attention, as streamers like Hikaru Nakamura, Levy Rozman and the Botez sisters started playing against it. Mittens’ viral fame didn’t just come from its prowess on the chessboard, where it revealed itself as a ruthless killer, but also from the nasty, sadistic comments it provided during games: “I am become Mittens, the destroyer of kings. I exist at this chess board through all times and realities . . . hehehe. Meow.”
According to a story in the Independent, Chess.com users described Mittens as a “chess nightmare”, “a psycho” and a “terrible, terrible cat”. It was Will Whalen, a student at Hamilton College (Major: world politics) and a part-time contributor to Chess.com’s social media team, who came up with the idea. In an interview in April 2023, he said, “Mittens was originally a pitched joke that ended up getting very out of hand.” Whalen noted that his colleague Sean Becker, who was leading the bots project, wrote Mittens’ interactions with help from other content team members. They ensured that the cat would always start very calm and cuddly but then would “devolve into madness”, even quoting Nietzsche. Not your everyday cat-on-the-internet experience.
Excerpted with permission from The Chess Revolution: Understanding the Power of an Ancient Game in the Digital Age, Peter Doggers, Hachette India.
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