The Say Chess Newsletter

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Is the chess (Twitch) boom over?
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Is the chess (Twitch) boom over?

Martin B. Justesen
May 9
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Is the chess (Twitch) boom over?
saychess.substack.com

Numbers from https://twitchtracker.com

Some days ago IM Rozman tweeted about the decline of the chess boom.

Twitter avatar for @GothamChessGothamChess @GothamChess
We are finally seeing the slow decline of the chess boom. Everyone's numbers are down. I am eternally grateful for the past 2 years, and I feel a sense of responsibility to keep pushing our game to people who haven't been captivated by it yet.

April 29th 2022

168 Retweets8,676 Likes

I have taken a look at the Twitch chess data1 and the monthly games played on Lichess since the chess Twitch peak that happened in February 2021.

As you can see the average concurrent viewers is down from 33000 in February 2021 to 8000 in April 2022 ~ 76 % lower. This is while the number of games on Lichess is down only 2% in the same period.

It seems people keep playing chess, but have moved away from watching streamers play chess. The number of average concurrent chess streams is also dropping.

The easing of the covid restrictions worldwide might also play into these changes. If we look at the number of viewers that the streamers are competing over we can see that at the peak in February 2021, there were 212 viewers per streamer, while we are down to 119 per streamer now.

Even after the decline chess is still the top 18 game overall to stream based on the viewer/streamer ratio according to twitchtracker.com.

What do you make of these changes? Join the discussion below.

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Thanks for reading The Say Chess Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive a free sample of my book ‘Blindfold Opening Visualization’.

Read part II:

The Say Chess Newsletter
Is The Chess (Twitch) Boom Over? Looking at Data From Chess.com - Part II
I posted my last newsletter on r/chess and it got a fair share of views (125.000+). It also led to some discussions about whether I was Lichess-biased. Here is one view: "I think if you’re inside the chess social-media bubble with its pretty extreme lichess bias, it’s easy to assume that lichess is online chess, or close enough to be a sufficient repres…
Read more
23 days ago · 3 likes · Martin B. Justesen

/Martin

1

https://twitchtracker.com/games/743

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Jason Tong
Jun 6Liked by Martin B. Justesen

Great chess newsletter, both to you and to Nate

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Alain
May 10Liked by Martin B. Justesen

Cool analysis and graphs! Maybe you could acknowledge that you have no data on chess.com - the site that is heavily featured on Twitch streams. Hard to generalize such as "people keep playing chess" when one big part of the picture is missing...

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