What is the cause of recent chess boom?

2020 was a year of chess renaissance. Lockdown combined with the Netflix series queen's gambit (and of course a number of YouTubers) did to chess what the cold war (Bobby Fischer era) barely achieved. I could see the numbers on chess websites rising and locals discussing the game of chess like never before. I was expecting the numbers to go down once the lockdown is lifted, which probably did (Forgive me for making such claims without any data to back it up).

More recently though, many chess videos on YouTube are hitting a million views regularly. I've never seen 130,000 online players on lichess (consistently for more than a month). Unlike 2020, I am unable to trace the origin of the more recent chess boom (it's hard to deny the boom even without the data).

@Renormalisation said in #1:
> Unlike 2020, I am unable to trace the origin of the more recent chess boom (it's hard to deny the boom even without the data).

Soccer players posing with a chess set in an advertising campaign before the World Cup: olympics.com/en/news/lionel-messi-cristiano-ronaldo-chess-picture-louis-vuitton-instagram

The World Chess Champion accusing a GM of cheating: www.cbssports.com/general/news/chess-sex-toy-cheating-scandal-explained-world-no-1-magnus-carlsen-hans-niemann-in-wild-sports-controversy/

And Mittens the unbeatable chess cat getting threatened by a horror movie villain: www.wsj.com/articles/chess-mittens-cat-bot-11674018529

Chess has been getting a lot of attention lately.

Lichess is probably seeing record traffic because chess.com is having serious technical problems, and people are fed up with it crashing, so they are playing here instead.

The technical issues have arisen because their cyber cat generated so much unforeseen interest. I heard about high school kids with no previous interest in the game, going on chess.com to play Mittens. Whether it was brilliant marketing, or a colossal f*** up, remains to be seen...........

@Bellendo said in #3:
> Lichess is probably seeing record traffic because chess.com is having serious technical problems, and people are fed up with it crashing, so they are playing here instead.

Chess.com's the market leader: they've got a strategy to grow the game overall, and no doubt expect some to come over here because they prefer the UI or the philosophy or the features or whatever reason they may have, but they'll be the main beneficiaries as long as their problems don't drag on too long.

@Bellendo said in #3:
> The technical issues have arisen because their cyber cat generated so much unforeseen interest. I heard about high school kids with no previous interest in the game, going on chess.com to play Mittens. Whether it was brilliant marketing, or a colossal f*** up, remains to be seen...........

No reason why it can't be both. Didn't lichess also have to scale up when interest in chess went through the roof during the pandemic and with the Queen's Gambit? It would be interesting to see some numbers and ask whether their servers would cope with the sort of increase in demand that Chess.com is seeing. Chess.com had a hit with Puzzle Rush awhile ago, but the type of success from Mittens isn't really something that lichess can replicate very well, or indeed is interested in: the nature of their set up means they're really oriented more to existing chess players than trying to attract new ones.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt8Y0vvDRYI
www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/chess-is-booming-and-our-servers-are-struggling

Two good resources on explaining relevant issues

Seems like a good time for lichess fanboys to flood chess.com forums with lichess advertisements.

My friend made a team.
lichess.org/team/unofficial-marketing-team

@Renormalisation said in #1:

> More recently though, many chess videos on YouTube are hitting a million views regularly. I've never seen 130,000 online players on lichess (consistently for more than a month). Unlike 2020, I am unable to trace the origin of the more recent chess boom (it's hard to deny the boom even without the data).

I'll help you out, it must be all the "bs". Get your decoder ring out.

m=bs

word: boom

Chess boomers flooding chess servers!
Plenty of accounts banned for computer assistance!
Coincidence? Don't think so!