![]() “It’s really important to onboard people and make them feel like - it’s a steep learning curve, but if you’re in a good community and you have the right resources, you won’t be put off by it. “Obviously, once The Queen’s Gambit came in October, I really just doubled down on that,” Rozman explained. Between Hikaru Nakamura signing with esports organization TSM in August and Netflix releasing The Queen’s Gambit in October, chess had nowhere to go but up. competed to win $50,000.Īfter that, interest in the game just kept growing. For the first PogChamps tournament, huge Twitch streamers including Félix “xQc” Lengyel and Charles “MoistCr1tikal” White Jr. So what happened? Well, over the summer, chess saw a big boom on Twitch thanks to PogChamps, an online amateur chess tournament hosted by. Around June, though, he started to pick up some serious steam, jumping from 21,328 followers at the beginning of June to 101,212 by the end of October. At the beginning of 2020, his channel had just over 17,800 followers. It’s a good thing Rozman never gave up on streaming. It could be in a hoodie, sitting in my chair, playing games, trash-talking - things I couldn’t do if I had a 6-year-old student in front of me, which was mostly what I was doing on a day-to-day basis.” “Playing chess, socializing and I could do what I did in the classroom during the day, very chill. “I think for me the biggest element was just like, the social element,” Rozman said. He quickly fell in love with streaming, as it combined two of his favorite pastimes: playing chess and socializing. The chess pro didn’t let the uncertainty and unpredictability deter him, though. When he first started streaming, he said, the chess side of Twitch was “like the Wild West” with just a few streamers, none of whom seemed to know what they were doing. Rozman created his Twitch channel back in February 2018, for no other reason than he was bored and needed something to do after he got home from teaching. obviously, with all this explosion, it’s becoming that. “For me, was definitely not the primary source of income. ![]() I was teaching chess Monday through Sunday,” Rozman explained to In The Know. “I wasn’t streaming full-time until 6 months ago. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. With more than 206,000 followers, the 25-year-old New York City native turned streaming - or, if you ask his father, “high-tech panhandling” - into a full-time gig in 2020, something that felt unfeasible just a year prior. One of the biggest chess streamers on Twitch - the third most popular, according to TwitchMetrics - is Levy Rozman, aka Gotham Chess. In December, the average chess stream was bringing in more than 16,000 concurrent viewers, and interest in the 1,500-year-old game doesn’t appear to be letting up. ![]() At the beginning of quarantine, the game was far from popular: According to Twitch Tracker, the average chess streamer at the time received just 3,573 concurrent viewers.Īs COVID-19 spread like wildfire, though, so did interest in the game, thanks in large part to grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura becoming more active on the platform and the popularity of Netflix’s coming-of-age chess drama, The Queen’s Gambit. However, during these unprecedented times, a much, much older game also started to pick up steam: chess.Ģ020 was a pivotal year for chess. Many of the channels and creators that became household names amid quarantine played previously popular video games like Fortnite, Minecraft and World of Warcraft. Unsurprisingly, one of the companies that saw extreme success was Twitch: From March to April alone, the platform saw a 50 percent increase in hours spent watching its videos, according to StreamElements. Though many industries suffered in 2020 as a result of lockdowns and quarantine orders nationwide, others capitalized on the shift to spending more time indoors, at home and online. Welcome to Level Up, In The Know’s look at some of the gaming world’s most interesting content creators - and the tech that helps them get the job done. Pricing and availability are subject to change. If you love them too and decide to purchase through the links below, we may receive a commission. Our team is dedicated to finding and telling you more about the products and deals we love.
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