This Is What Happens When Two 17 Year Olds Organize A Worldwide Chess Tournament

A couple of weeks later, another friend of ours did something incredible by winning the U20 School Rapid National Championship. I sent a picture of him to Axel, and Axel replied with something like, "he's the goat." That got us jokingly suggesting we needed a whole tournament of “goat players.” What started as a joke quickly turned into a real idea.

Axel and I had previously organized OTB tournaments at our houses, which are right next to each other, but those were just with local friends. This time, we wanted something BIG. We aimed for players from all over the world who were decently strong and around our age, but we had no clue where to start.

We decided to set up a closed 16-player knockout tournament with group stages, similar to football’s Champions League. So, we named it the Champions League of Chess, or “The Champions Chess League.”

We started by writing down potential names, including me, Axel, Oliver (the guy who won the national championship), Jan Marn, William Olsson, and a few other Swedish friends. We decided on having 8 Swedish players and 8 international players. We included some international friends we already knew, like Aron Pasti, whom I met at a chess camp in Norway six months earlier.

We then started DMing players on Instagram, asking if they wanted to join. We began with a few players from a Slovak friend group that shared mutual friends with me. It went well, and five of them accepted our invite. However, we still needed to find the sole remaining player. We reached out to several people, but nobody seemed to be available. Finally, we managed to get Albanian player Aleksander Xhembulla, who had beaten Axel in the same tournament where William Olsson beat Jan Marn 2.5 years earlier.

Everything seemed set and done, but just as we were about to launch the tournament, we got a late reply from Polish player Martyna Starosta, who was keen on playing. We could have denied her, but I realized I probably didn’t want to play because I instead wanted to focus on the technical side of things. So, I thought it would be best if she replaced me, and that's what we did.

The Beginning

It started off smooth like butter. I launched an announcement video and Axel reached out to the Swedish chess press about our new tournament concept. They found it really exciting and wrote an article.

However, not everything went smoothly. Our first stream was a disaster. It was so bad that I can’t even begin to explain it. The overlay was ugly with an annoying moving background, we had no idea how to commentate, and worst of all, our mic sounded like it was made of potatoes. I think that was when we lost the faith of our brand-new Swedish viewers. It was a pain to watch.

Fortunately, we learned from our mistakes and the production improved significantly. My friend and I designed a whole new OBS overlay from scratch with smooth moving transitions. Equally important, Axel and I started using my old Blue Yeti microphone that had been gathering dust for ages.

The Rilton Cup 2023/2024

Sweden has one major tournament called the Rilton Cup, which takes place at the turn of the year. This time, a few international players were joining in. Aron was going to stay at my house for the tournament, and Axel had managed to convince Jan Marn to come too. Besides them, Martyna Starosta, the Polish player, was also participating, along with many of the Swedish players.

This was pretty exciting since the goal of the CCL was to connect young players across Europe and build friendships, and now we were about to put that to the test. And let me tell you, it was such a vibe. We often hung out with Jan Marn and Aron in the analysis room, playing blitz games.

It was especially ironic because in round 3 we got to see our first CCL match OTB - Aron Pasti vs Jan Marn.

I managed to snap a one-in-a-lifetime picture of Aron as soon as he witnessed his mistake. I should honestly use this as my wallpaper because it’s iconic.

Just when Jan thought it was over, he got paired against another CCL participant: none other than... William Olsson, HIS OLD NEMESIS. The 10-game blitz match back in October might have crowned Jan as the GOAT, but now he had to prove why he deserved the title once again.

William once again got the better of Jan in the classical games, but spoiler alert: Jan would have the last laugh in the CCL ;)

It was now the rest day, and Martyna, who we hadn’t talked to much yet, came over to our analysis table with her friend and asked what fun things there were to do in Stockholm. We hadn’t thought about that yet, so we quickly came up with a plan to go bowling and invited them along.

It was a blast and a great way to bond. When it came to the bowling itself, I obviously DESTROYED Jung Hyun Seo and Aron. Not that there was much competition...

This was a pic I took at the end of the tournament:

It’s Martyna looking at a blitz game between William and Jan while Axel, Oliver, Aron and Anton are talking in the background.

Slow But Steady Progress

Since we didn’t use fixed dates and let the players tell us when they were available, things got tricky towards the end of the school semester. We couldn’t stream during school days because we had to study, and weekends were tough too because of all the tournaments. This meant we only managed to play a few matches each month. Progress was slow, and we didn’t have time to promote the tournament.

Therefore, me and Axel came to the conclusion to focus on school and only start promoting the CCL as soon as we hit the knockout stages.

The Start of a New Chapter

We finally reached the knockouts and it was time to start promoting the tournament, but I had no idea how. I had some experience creating short videos on my old experimental YouTube channel called TetraChess, and while I could edit, my skills in making captivating videos were pretty limited. I posted maybe five shorts on the CCL YouTube channel, but they didn’t gain much traction.

Things seemed bleak, but out of nowhere, a random Belgian guy named Tim DM’d the CCL Instagram account and said he really liked the tournament. He then asked if he could help out in any way. It turned out he had a pretty successful French YouTube and TikTok channel. He mentioned that he used to add a CTA to the end of his videos that led to a Discord server, where he’d create events and drive people to his Twitch where he streamed with his friends.

So we got to work. Tim showed me how to use Discord effectively and helped me improve the hooks in our short videos. As we worked together, we became friends, and I began posting some lichess studies to attract people to the Discord server. It wasn’t until Axel came up with a brilliant idea that we started seeing a surge in members. His idea was to host a simultaneous event, and since both Axel and I were titled players, we’d appear on the homepage and draw in a lot of people.

From the sunny beaches of Spain on vacation, Axel hosted the first simul, accepting everyone who joined the Discord. It was a hit. We saw 10-15 people join within just a few minutes, which was a huge boost compared to what we’d seen before. This made me realize that this marketing strategy could be effective elsewhere too.

I started creating a study on pawn endgames and, once it was finished, I hosted a simul and encouraged participants to check out the study. This helped the study climb the ranks of "hot studies," and more and more people began to look at it. Since it was a very high-quality study, it quickly gained traction, and suddenly it was at the #1 spot. At many points, there were around 50-70 people online at the same time studying, and many of them clicked through to our Discord link.

As I’m writing this, we’ve got 163 members and it’s growing every day. If you’re interested in joining, we offer chess advice from masters like me and game analysis.

Our Future Plans

We’re really excited about growing interest in the Champions Chess League. Initially, our goal was to connect young chess players and get them involved in the social side of chess. But now, we’re also looking to build a whole community of CCL viewers.

So far, everything has been done for free, and there’s no prize for winning the Champions Chess League yet. If anyone is interested in sponsoring us, please reach out to vidar.grahn@championschessleague.com or drop us a message on Discord :)

For more information about the tournament check out our website: https://championschessleague.com/