STAVANGER: A couple of days ago, Paris St. Germain (PSG) tweeted a photo of D Gukesh, a very rare crossover between the world champion and an elite football club, to their 5.2 mn followers. It was a reaction of the Indian teen immediately after Magnus Carlsen had resigned during their Norway Chess encounter. The French club had tweeted Gukesh's expression with the caption: "What it felt like winning our first UCL." At the time of writing, it had 444 replies, 7.7k reposts, 149k likes and 3mn engagements.
A week or so before that, Carlsen, after he beat Gukesh on the opening day of Norway Chess, shared a quote from The Wire, the hit US TV series, on his own X account. "You come at the King," it said, "you best not miss." At the time of writing, it had 1.1k replies, 1.5k reposts, 9.9k likes and 1.6mn engagements.
To a lot of people, chess remains a very serious pursuit.
But it's also at odds with how the game, over the last few years at least, has become 'cool'. It's snackable, memeable and there's content to be had in a lot of ways. You open Insta and there's a chessfluencer giving you a breakdown on how to do a Fool's Mate (one of the quickest ways to checkmate).
At the ongoing event in Stavanger for example, there's a four-member social media team, including one from ChessBase India. As soon as PSG posted the image of Gukesh trying to process what had just happened, the team felt extra happy.
Because the game — even at the elite level — doesn't lend itself automatically to sponsors and generous funding from corporates, tournament organisers love getting eyeballs like these. Srinath Narayanan, one of the brains behind the nascent Chennai Grand Masters meet, in an interaction with The New Indian Express a few days ago, had mentioned that there could be an inherent bias towards inviting GMs with bigger social media footprints if their profiles are similar. "For example, if you are looking to invite a player rated 2675 or thereabouts to your event and you have only one slot, you may go towards the player with x number of social media followers."
Whether by chance or design, chess is also catching on to the trend of hyping up the many young players. Take the case of 11-year-old Faustino Oro, an Argentine prodigy. An International Master, Oro is nicknamed as chessi.
A few days ago, Oro faced off against the legendary Viswanathan Anand in a two-game showdown in Italy. Ever since the pandemic began, a lot of stakeholders have pumped in money into one-off events like these because they know this is now content (Hans Niemann played Anish Giri in a similar standalone encounter several days ago).
"Though I play less these days," Anand tells The New Indian Express, "these kind of events are nice. You get to go to Italy... the glamour clearly attracted me there, Andrea Bocelli (musician) is playing there. When I get there, I was like 'what the hell if I lose, nobody will let me forget it'. It's not like I never have second thoughts... you have noticed that I don't play that many serious events."
Not just Anand, who is, at best, a semi-retired pro. Even some of the players inside the Top-10 play exhibition matches like this because there is a demand for these events. Wherever there's demand, there's supply. It's just basic economics in this context.
Chess.com's hugely successful 'Title Tuesday' is also a direct product of games, at least in part, being driven by content. It existed as a corner on the website as a monthly game in 2014. After the pandemic, it's played every Tuesday with over 900 players and a proper prize fund.
On a dark, grim and wet Tuesday afternoon, Lokesh Natoo, a chessfluencer with over a lakh subscribers across his social media channels, rushes out with his phone to capture the likes of Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura entering the building, walk down a flight of steps and go inside the playing hall. He spends some 10 minutes editing it, putting in some BGM before uploading it as a reel.
As of Thursday, that video has given him over eight million impressions.
Content, he says.