Rattibha

Chess is a boring sport & yet Indians are going CRAZY over it
In fact, Chess(.)com has a 100M users & earns $100M+ a year!
The crazy part? Some high-profile chess matches have even surpassed the viewership of some cricket matches!
THREAD: How Chess became mainstream in India🧵

Not long ago, chess was just a board game for nerds.
But now, it is the new ‘big thing’ — so much so that you find people playing chess during class, while shopping, before bed, and in virtually every other pocket of time they can find in the day.

And Chessdotcom brought this board game online
— clocking an average of a staggering 11 million daily active users!
Some schools even had to ban Chessdotcom because their students were playing too much chess!
But how did a boring board game become the new ‘cool’ sport in town?

See, every famous sport got its popularity when it bred a community around it.
It is always more fun watching cricket with family or spending a late night watching football with friends.
Exchanging thoughts and enjoying the sport with other people is what makes it entertaining.

This was missing in chess up until a few years ago.
With the massive rise of e-sports, online communities started forming around niche interests.
People around the world came together over platforms like Discord, Reddit, and Twitch to discuss lesser-known sports like chess.

Streamers like GothamChess and Samay Raina in India also pivoted to chess during the pandemic when everyone was home — giving their audience a creative mix of humor and the game instead of the boring old move analyses.

This popularity only rose when the Netflix series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ sparked layman interest in chess through pop culture.

And finally, when Grandmasters like Hikaru Nakamura joined chess streamers, there was no turning back.

Already, chess was gaining attention as the ‘genius sport’. And because being ‘nerdy’ and ‘genius’ is cool again, chess became an easy tool for people to show off their smarts.

So even if people got addicted to and spent a lot of time playing on Chessdotcom, they did not mind it because it didn’t just entertain them, it validated them!

And the success of chess as an online sport can be attributed to the nature of the game itself, where short-form content minimized the time-to-value ratio, and people could view even complex breakdowns of a move in mere seconds.

Unlike other sports like football or cricket, a viewer does not have to watch the whole match to understand the context in chess; just one look at the board is enough to tell its story.

What’s more? Chess is extremely accessible.
— It is a game that is challenging but not discouragingly difficult, hooking people’s interest due to its unpredictability.

Moreover, many even believe it is the ultimate ‘equaliser’ — your age, gender, class strata, etc., do not matter compared to other competitive activities.
All it requires is a simple board, pieces, and players — with no room to blame or credit anyone other than the players.

This accessibility was made even easier during the pandemic when people could play other chess players at a similar level from around the world online.
Chessdotcom even gamified chess by replacing alphanumeric visuals with an encouraging user interface — hooking them to chess.

With a massive revenue of over $100M, Chessdotcom also heavily marketed this sport, organized tournaments, and even made chess stalwarts like Grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand their brand ambassador.

So, this ancient sport, which was once perceived as boring, became the new cool thing not because the sport itself had changed, but because of its newfound community and engagement!