MAHABALIPURAM: Anna Cramling looks slightly concerned. She's carrying a tripod with a high-end smartphone attached to it. But she's having a problem getting the internet sorted. So, she is running around, trying to troubleshoot. The only problem is the event she's trying to shoot has begun. Viswanathan Anand is having a workshop for kids and Cramling is supposed to broadcast it to the watching chess community online. She misses the first 20 or so minutes but it works out in the end.
It's a glimpse into Cramling's world. Normally, Cramling is a gun in these situations. On Twitch, the Amazon-owned website meant for people broadcasting themselves, she is one of the biggest stars. The 20-year-old has 219,000 followers, watching her put up engrossing content, related to chess or otherwise. The Swede, who is at the Olympiad playing for her country, even considers herself a 'streamer first', chess player second. Welcome to the world of elite chess where streaming content to hundreds of thousands of followers is now as common as the Ruy Lopez opening.
How did chess take off on the internet? The short answer is the pandemic. Covid-19's rules and restrictions locked a lot of people at home for far too long. With nothing to do, people started looking towards the internet to keep themselves busy. Now, Twitch was an extremely popular website even pre-pandemic. A lot of gamers streamed content on their channels. People subscribed to their channels so this model was already in place.
Several chess players were already on Twitch -- with 1.5mn followers, Hikaru Nakumara, the World No. 8 is the obvious example -- but a lot of them jumped on the bandwagon in the summer of 2020. One of those was Netherlands' Benjamin Bok. "Covid had just happened, there wasn't much to do," he tells this daily. "There weren't many tournaments. I saw a lot of streamers become successful so I thought 'why not give this a try?' Eventually, I managed to build up a following."
The three-time Dutch champion, who is on board three for the country at the Olympiad, is slightly under-selling his success. More than 33,000 people are following his verified handle, GMBenjaminBok. The challenge now, though, is to strike a balance between building a successful Twitch career and still be a player at the top level.
Not many have managed to get the best of both worlds. Nakamura -- who is the undisputed king of chess on Twitch -- is the exception. The Spanish newspaper, El Pais, estimated in June that the US player's wealth was around $50mn thanks to his streaming career. He's also a very handy chess player, ranked World No 6. The 34-year-old is able to maintain both. In fact, he continued to stream while playing the Candidates, the eight-team tournament that identifies the challenger for the World Championship.
A few like Bok, for example, have a clear line. He stopped putting out content for the last two months. He also decided to not put any streams during the course of the Olympiad. "The main challenge (in terms of striking balance) is you have to be educational towards your viewers but you also don't want to dumb it down too much for yourself. You want to be able to perform at the highest possible level. It just kind of depends on what kinds of content you do. If you play a lot of tournaments on your stream then you just stay in good shape," the Dutch GM says.
At some level, streaming looks like easy hours to make some money on the side. But that is not the case. The prep can be exhausting. South Africa's Rebecca Selkirk explains. When Jesse February, a compatriot, and she were sharing a Twitch handle, they used to spend close to 200 hours a month preparing and putting out content. "Usually, streams can go for 3.5 to 4 hours," she tells this daily. 'It's for standard content. You have to reply to comments. Think about the videos that will go on YouTube. You have to manage other social media handles." It got so extreme that Selkirk, who goes by HashtagChess on Twitch (14,500 followers), was constantly thinking about content ideas even when she was showering.
To stand out from a very crowded field, Selkirk, who broke away from February, often experiments. A few months ago, she had a meme off between lJersey's Tallulah Roberts and her former Twitch partner. However, she's put a stop to content while she works on two of her main avenues: a PhD (Economics) and chess. She makes it clear that she's a chess player first, streamer second.
Cramling, though, makes it very clear. "Streamer first, player second," she says. "I see streaming as my main career. It’s been fun to play chess competitively like this now because I can mix both of them. But I do see streaming and making content as my premier career."
She too got swept into the craze of chess streaming in the early months of the pandemic. "For the first six months, I was just streaming for fun. There were no chess tournaments happening. So I never really had to make a choice. Six months into streaming, it started to take off and I realised that I really loved doing it and I wanted to keep going." She kept going, and how. She even broadcasts her own game, with friends commenting on it. Roberts also does it. Though she's conscious of blundering with a few followers watching it. "People are watching games on my Twitch, my friends are broadcasting commentary," she says. "Knowing that when I blunder, a couple of 100 people see it every time, kind of hurts a little bit. But you kind of have to drone that out."
What keeps all the streamers going, though, is the support the community reserves for them. It's also had a ripple effect in that it has made the game more accessible. "A lot of people like chess but they don’t know how to go about it perhaps. Finding it online makes it more accessible," notes Cramling.
Bok agrees. "I think during Covid, people were looking for new things to do and I think everyone, at least once in their life, played chess. So, they sort of reinvented the game for themselves. They found that they enjoyed it. I think nobody really sort of saw this coming, chess taking off."
The pandemic was grim -- it continues to remain grim for a lot of people -- but it has totally changed the face of a game that was thought to be boring.