This Decision "Changed My Life And My Chess"

WFM Lile Koridze was the national youth chess champion of Georgia in several age categories and has since become one of the brightest young new stars of the chess media world. Not many people can rightfully claim to have beaten GM Hikaru Nakamura at chess, and even fewer on stream in the past few years, but Lile is one of them. Her tournament game recaps, streaming of Titled Tuesday and Bullet Brawl games, and rapid games against subscribers with a real board is just some of what Lile does on her Twitch and YouTube channels.

We talked to her about her content process, her beginnings in the content world, her natural creativity, and more.

How long have you been creating chess content, and what made you decide to start?

I have been creating chess content since I was 17, around five years now. First of all, love of chess made me start creating chess content. I thank my family, who was very supportive, and also my coach at the time, GM David Arutinian. He also streams on Twitch.

David was really pushing me to start streaming back in 2019, back when chess was kind of new to Twitch. There were very few streamers, but it had some potential. And my coach had been watching it since 2018 and he was telling me to try it. But I was worried because I was 17 years old, I didn't speak English as well, I was really shy, and I had zero clue how the technical stuff worked. But he kept encouraging me, saying that maybe this would help my chess career.

And this was the best decision I ever made, thanks to David's encouragement. I'm really happy that I became a streamer. It changed my life, and changed my chess, because I would not be able to travel and play chess over the world as much as I do right now if I was not a streaming content creator.

What’s your favorite thing about creating? What makes it fun?

When I am creating chess content, I feel in totally different world, which makes me in peace, also introducing chess to new people makes me feel fulfilled in life. I also have the opportunity to travel a lot thanks to chess tournaments and twitch streaming and all of this make it so fun.

Imagine you could do a chess-based collab with anyone in the world. Who would it be, and why?

Hikaru, GothamChess, BotezLive and many others, since they are so much fun.

I actually wanted to ask you about that game you won against Hikaru!

So first of all to start this was the biggest surprise I would ever get in my life! I play Bullet Brawl almost every week when I have the chance, and I played Hikaru before many times. When I play games against him I'm the most focused person, I try to do my best. He is the strongest, so why not do my best, and sometimes I had pretty good games. But of course when you're nervous I kinda of spoil it, but this time when I was playing this game, slowly I realized that I was not losing yet.

Something was happening, and definitely he made some mistakes, and then I'm like wait a second, am I winning now?! And I was really winning! But the main thing was that I had to remain calm, because you might have a winning game but many things can change because you get nervous, you want to win quickly, etc. So I think this was my biggest advantage, that I managed to stay calm. And then after I won, I could not continue playing in the event, I was too excited!

What is your single favorite piece of chess content you've been a part of?

Checkmate Trivia Showdown hosted by KDLearns and Chess.com, which I won and had a lot of fun.

I really did not expect to win because I was really scared of the trivia to be honest. Fiona was absolutely great. In trivia, she knew so many things, I was like, what do I know!? But thankfully I knew some stuff, plus many questions were not about chess. So I managed to go through it. But I had more confidence in chess, the chess puzzles were also really great. And of course I got also bit lucky in some moments. One answer I had seen on Instagram before and it was worth so many points in the game! I'm really happy that I won this.

Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process?

I would say it’s random a lot of the time: I can get an idea out of nowhere by watching a YouTube video or while reading an article. Then I write down these ideas. Some will never be used, but some have potential. Then I try to figure out when and how can I realize the idea, and prepare all my tools as needed.

Have you found any patterns in what types of content ideas are more successful than others?

Nowadays chess is not only just about chess—it’s also content, it’s also entertainment. So some things for example, if I have a short period of time available I like to just scroll for a little bit. I don't want to spend too much time scrolling, but when I do it, I see many content ideas which are not chess that can be transferred into chess. Nowadays you see so many top content creators using top trends which they transfer into chess, so I'm really working on that.

Naturally some ideas won’t work, like you might want to transfer something but it's not a great fit for chess because chess sometimes is still niche. It's not something like football [soccer], for example, which is easier to understand.

Any final thoughts?

When I was a child, I enjoyed singing, playing in the theatre, recording things with my old Nokia. I was already creating small things, and I enjoyed it so much. I also used to post articles when I was just 10 years old and I even liked to translate English articles into Georgian. So I have been in this creative world since childhood, and I think that’s what pushed me to be here right now.

But of course, I would never imagine—as a child you are dreaming of Hollywood, some stuff like this, but of course I couldn't end up in Hollywood...

I think this is probably better! You don't want to deal with everything that comes with Hollywood.

I would call it really mini-Hollywood, but a better version! But I mean I had this feeling that I would end up doing something like this, and it turned out true because I found out that I have this talent, and I'm really happy that this became my passion.

I do my best to develop it because it's also about development and getting inspiration from people who are already established and already created many big things like many great chess content creators. I'm really happy they exist because they give us many opportunities, and actually it's really important for chess to have as many creators as possible because it grows the game. Chess is a really underrated sport and it really needs to be more visible in the world.