For many years, the subscriber base and profits rose gradually and steadily. Then the pandemic hit.
“You could track it by country,” said Mr. Allebest. “India was locked down, registrations from India skyrocketed. Italy went into lockdown, registrations shot through the roof. Our team literally went on a rampage 24/7 to scale up our service.”
A few months after the Covid influx into chess began, Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” a fictionalized account of a young woman’s journey from orphanage to global chess supremacy. It would become a cultural touchstone and the most watched show on the streaming service in more than 60 countries.
“It was like someone pouring petrol on the same fire,” Mr Allebest said.
Chess players became social media stars. Hikaru Nakamura, one of the defendants in the defamation case, has 1.5 million Twitch followers, a feat he accomplished through stellar play — he’s currently ranked fifth in the world — and iron man verbosity. In June, he signed with Misfits Gaming Group, an e-sports and entertainment company that invents shows to sell to places like CNN and Netflix.
These days, chess tournaments have pretty high production values - swooshing graphics, on-site interviews, play-by-play commentators sitting at newscasters’ desks. The model is based on pro sports game coverage, with one big difference: there’s no action, at least not in the conventional sense. The game has hardly changed in 1500 years. It’s still hour after hour of two people staring at a board and thinking. If a sentence like: “He blundered queen d8, queen d3!” doesn’t speed up your pulse, there’s not much to look at.
If so, these games are thrilling, cerebral contests that have elegance, aggression, subterfuge, brilliance, and suspense – “Game of Thrones” boiled down to its regal essence. Unlike the HBO show, this one never stops. There are now tournaments all over the world almost every weekend.
Graduating into the class of aspiring pros who play these tournaments didn’t make Mr. Niemann grow up and behave. He banged his fist when he lost a match in Dubai and dropped F-bombs in a Miami postgame interview, complaining about a technical glitch. He looked opponents in the eye a little too long, another no-no.
Some chess viewers were delighted. Finally a norm-breaking crook.
“I was like, this is what we need in chess,” said Levy Rozman, the face and voice of Gotham Chess, a popular YouTube channel. “We don’t have Conor McGregor,” he added, referring to the mixed martial arts champion known for altercations and arrests.