Sweden’s Pia Cramling was one of the first women crowned a chess grandmaster, and she held the highest women’s rating multiple times. Decades later, she is recognized by chess fans across the world. But it is not often for her own landmark accomplishments. Instead, it’s for making cameo appearances on the streaming platforms of her daughter, Anna Cramling, a popular chess influencer.
“It’s weird to think about the fact that she has this incredible history throughout her career, but now she’s known from my channel,” Anna Cramling, 23, said, adding: “She’s a celebrity in ways that she wasn’t before.”
The younger Cramling, also an accomplished chess player, has more than 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube. Her rapid growth is part of the game’s increasing popularity, a rising that blends the legacy of a centuries-old pastime played by two people across a table from each other with modern technology that instantly connects millions across the globe.
But this shift has created a gulf between chess’s traditional gatekeepers and a younger generation growing the game. And those conflicts have played out in public ways over the past year, most notably in the events leading up to the death three months ago of Daniel Naroditsky, a young star in the online chess world who had become a target of criticism from one of the game’s most respected players, Vladimir Kramnik, a Russian grandmaster and former world champion. The aftershocks of Naroditsky’s death are still being felt among fans.
(After initially being investigated as a suicide or accidental overdose, a toxicology report from the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released this week revealed Naroditsky had methamphetamine, amphetamine, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine in his system when he died.)
The rapid change in chess can largely be attributed to a surge of interest during the pandemic in 2020, when millions of housebound people found or rediscovered the game. With the popularity of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” that same year, chess started to look very different, very quickly.
Popular social media chess personalities like Cramling, Alexandra and Andrea Botez and Levy Rozman now attract millions of eyeballs to their channels to a pursuit once viewed by many as inaccessible. They specialize in distilling a complex, historical game into quick, digestible shorts.
“They’re bringing the richness and magic and history of chess into the new world of understanding it and some of the meme culture, humor and context that goes into the chess community,” said Erik Allebest, the CEO of Chess.com. “It’s fast, insightful and funny and it’s made watching chess as a consumer so much more enjoyable.”
And it’s also proven financially fruitful for the most successful of chess influencers. While some tournaments offer large prize purses, the new economic reality is that the top influencers are more popular and earn more money than most of the world’s highest-ranked players.
“It’s kind of obvious that they are jealous slash envious of those who are actually popularizing the game in numbers and aren’t the best chess players,” Rozman said about the older generation of players. “They see that as an unfair injustice.”
These tensions over how the game is played and consumed had been brewing, but burst into public consciousness last fall, most prominently when Kramnik, 50, accused Naroditsky of cheating. Naroditsky, who died three months ago at the age of 29, floated seamlessly between the internet-influencer and the established chess worlds and felt his reputation — and thus his earning ability — was threatened by Kramnik’s actions, according to Peter Giannatos, the founder of the Charlotte Chess Center in North Carolina.
The way that Naroditsky “was able to sustain a career, was, quite frankly, off the chessboard,” said Giannatos. “It was through commentary and content.”
Naroditsky, who wrote a chess column for The New York Times for several months in 2022, moved to Charlotte on the eve of the pandemic. At around the same time, he started streaming full time. Naroditsky had around 340,000 followers on Twitch and 515,000 subscribers on YouTube when he died on Oct. 19.
“He was a mensch,” Rozman said of Naroditsky. “It always felt like the Ph.D. professor. Talking and sitting with him was sort of like office hours where he was the cool professor and then he was the best chess commentator in the world.”
His platform’s growth aligned with the rises of not just online-specialists like Rozman and Cramling, but also Hikaru Nakamura, one of the world’s top-ranked players. All of them specialize in distilling the game into absorbable nuggets like Naroditsky did.
The charges from Kramnik that Naroditsky (and other online players) used a chess engine to cheat, Giannatos said, were “eating him alive” and could have threatened his livelihood if enough people believed a figure as respected as Kramnik.
In Naroditsky’s honor, the Charlotte Chess Center is fund-raising for a memorial championship and scholarships for young chess players. The International Chess Federation, known as FIDE, filed an ethics complaint against Kramnik accusing him of a pattern of harassing other players over two years. In response, Kramnik posted on social media in December that he had filed a defamation lawsuit against FIDE in civil court in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the chess federation is based.
In both their age, style of play and demeanor, Kramnik and Naroditsky embodied the divide in the modern chess landscape between the more convention-bound FIDE and the upstart Chess.com. In 2024, Kramnik posted a video criticizing Chess.com’s ability to host large events, citing problems like technical issues. He had also said there was cheating on the platform. He later closed his account.
“I have decided to stop playing on chess.com from tomorrow on,” he said. “Just too many obvious cheaters here and nothing is done to clean the platform from those small crooks. Harsh words but true.”
Part of that split is because chess players are traditionally solitary figures, Allebest said. In other sports, athletes now double as social media figures with large followings who are used to talking to the media.
“But we don’t see that in chess,” Allebest said. “They just want to show up at a tournament, play their games quietly, and then be done. That that’s not how you build a sport into a spectator sport, but that’s been a bit of the tradition.”
There have been efforts to modernize the in-person experience of chess. The Global Chess League, which was organized in part by FIDE, was launched in 2023 with a team-based format, mixed-gender teams and fan interaction.
“Our ambition is to make it so a family can sit together in the evening after dinner and watch just for half an hour,” said Peeyush Dubey, the league’s chair. “How do we make that happen? Because that’s the threshold that we have to cross.”
Magnus Carlsen, the five-time world champion and the game’s biggest star, also helped launch a league, the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour. In December, Carlsen won both the Rapid and Blitz championships in Doha, Qatar, which featured nearly 400 of the world’s top-ranked players.
Traditional and online chess do not necessarily need to merge, said Arkady Dvorkovich, FIDE’s president. Online platforms, Dvorkovich said, have opened the games to millions of people who may never be interested in playing the over-the-board variety.
But the governing body, he added, is better equipped to engage in online chess now than it was several years ago, and it may become more involved in the future.
“I’m not sure we are going to govern the digital chess world since private business does this in a in a good way,” he said.
Giannatos, of the Charlotte Chess Center, says that all parties would benefit from working together, but it’s hard for him to envision the online chess world and the game’s governing body finding common ground.
“The chess community could do itself a favor by trying to unite, but unfortunately it seems that, in my opinion, the traditional groups are less willing to conform and to join,” he added.
Anna Cramling remains optimistic but thinks the entire chess ecosystem may need to be rethought. “We’re seeing a wave that we’ve never seen before when it comes to chess,” she said. “But we need to think new and we cannot always have the same things we’ve always had simply because we’ve always had it.”
Jonathan Abrams is a Times reporter who writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South.
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