Why chess needs every influencer and the casual fans they bring to the sport

Indian Express

4 days ago

In the world of chess, a spicy feud is never more than a news cycle away. The year which started with Magnus Carlsen taking on FIDE over wearing jeans at a tournament has just seen its most needless controversy of the year.
The latest to and fro involves FIDE CEO Emil Sutovsky, who took exception to comments that popular streamer Levy Rozman, known as Gotham Chess to his 6.45 million YouTube subscribers, made in an interview with the influential New In Chess magazine. The magazine played up a quote on X with a photo of Rozman which read: 'People know three chess players: Magnus (Carlsen), Hikaru (Nakamura) and me. That's bad. That's not my fault. And I hope it changes.'
Even as Rozman tried to say the quote posted on X lacked context in which it was made during the interview, it got Sutovsky disagreeing with the comment in one tweet where, among other things, he wrote: 'I also feel that in general streamers/YouTubers' impact on the game is much less significant than it used to be a few years ago.' Sutovsky doubled down on this in his next post on X: 'I think there is another aspect to it, often neglected. Say, youtuber G vs youtuber S. G has three times more subscribers, but how many of them become real chess fans? Play regularly? Start following events, take chess lessons, become a part of chess ecosystem? S may have much less subscribers, but they become hardcore chess fans, and not just consumers of the channel's content. Who's contribution to the chess world is more important? I go with S.'
Rozman, affronted by what he termed was Sutovsky 'questioning his contributions to the chess world and his overall standing as a content creator', responded in the only way he knew how to, by creating more content: this time posting a 52-minute-long video on his YouTube handle (watched by 757k viewers), which started off as an impassioned defence of himself and ended with an interview with ChessBase India's Sagar Shah, who was being compared to Rozman by Sutovsky.
Rozman went on to point out how vague some of the things Sutovsky had raised were. Like what is the definition of a 'hardcore fan'? Or a 'real fan', for that matter? How does one measure contributions from two influencers to a sport? Or, more importantly, why is the FIDE CEO even looking to compare contributions from two social media influencers?
Shouldn't the global governing body of a sport be happy at any attention it receives? Sutovky himself, in an interview with ChessBase India a couple of months back, had spoken at length about how chess is a 'complex sport to follow for the wider public'. He added that at the moment chess is a product that is best suited to be consumed by 'hardcore chess audiences'. But in Rozman, the sport has someone who simplifies a complex sport for that very subsection of the wider public.
An affronted Rozman pointed out that the FIDE CEO's post on X was implying that the fans he brought into the sport did not matter as much because they were 'casual fans' who don't convert to 'hardcore fans'. 'He's inherently pitting chess fans against one another whereas sports only survive and thrive based on casual fandom. This is such a backwards argument. Fundamentally this is the problem of the chess world. We do not make it more accessible,' said Rozman.
The sport, more than any other in the world right now, finds itself in an endless loop of controversy driving public attention towards itself. If Carlsen quits a tournament over jeans or smashes his fist on a table after a loss, it makes headlines in places around the world where it doesn't usually penetrate.
Rozman also alleged that FIDE doesn't market events that it organises like the Candidates and then adding that the prize fund for the World Chess Championship — the most coveted event in the sport — has not grown in almost 40 years. (This is not entirely accurate: the total prize fund at last year's World Championship match, which Gukesh won, was $2.5 million. Whereas the overall prize fund for the FIDE World Chess Championship in 1990 between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov was even higher, $3 million!) Rozman placed the responsibility for both of these things at FIDE's doorsteps.
The sport, despite its recently post-pandemic glow up and incoming new fans, is still struggling to find television broadcasters (Sutovsky himself had said that getting chess on TV was an 'insurmountable task' in a recent interview), one of the best yardsticks for judging a sport's popularity.
In all fairness to FIDE, it does do a fair bit away from the spotlight when it comes to creating chess tournaments, not just at the elite levels, but also at the age group events like World Junior Championships. This includes events like the World Schools Championships, where FIDE bears the costs of one team per country. FIDE also has a program in place where a national chess federation can nominate two players to get online training under some of the top coaches in the world.
The sport has other impending challenges creeping up on it as well: Carlsen, who is the face of the sport, is slowly but surely drifting away from the traditional formats of the sport. Once he leaves, does the sport have anyone who can take his place and pull in casual audiences that don't necessarily understand the sport, but will stop by to read the headlines anyway? Maybe not.
The most mature take on the whole matter came from Shah, whose ChessBase India channel has 2.72 million subscribers (which, as Sutovsky pointed out, was three times less than Rozman's).
'Be it chess organizations, creators, top players, it is clear that we are all helping each other and pushing the chess ecosystem in the right direction in our own special ways,' Shah wrote on X. 'I think it is futile to think who has contributed more to the cause of popularizing chess.'
Chess needs all the influencers and all the fans — no matter if they're casual fans or hardcore ones — it can get. But more than anything, it needs better and more substantial feuds.
Amit Kamath is Assistant Editor at The Indian Express and is based in Mumbai. ... Read More