GothamChess: The Man Who Changed Chess Forever
Have you heard of GothamChess? commonly referred to as Levy Rozman, He is the most popular chess content creator in history, he might have even changed chess forever! This, is his youtube journey.
The Pandemic Chess Boom
Everyone here knows about the pandemic chess boom, right? It's what caused sites like chess.com to become what it is today, It also changed chess content creation forever.
Competitions like pogchamps were created, with influential people such as xqc, Pokimane, Ludwig, and even boxbox. Most of you started playing chess after this chess boom.
This is where GothamChess was starting to get popularity, he was starting to do collabs with people like GM Hikaru Nakamura, WGM Anna Rudolf, and even Ludwig. I started watching his channel since October 2020, he barely had 500k subscribers on Youtube.
As of March 2, 2023, he is the most subscribed and highest total viewed chess-focused youtube channel of ALL TIME, being the first one to get over 1 Billion views.
Twitch Streaming
He is also known as a Twitch Streamer, recently he was nominated for Best Chess Streamer. (Link)
This is another area where he got popular, he has thousands of viewers watching him live on twitch. (Link)
He would later start a series so good and popular that it would dominate his channel over the years.
Guess The Elo
If you're a GothamChess subscriber, you have definitely watched at least 1 episode of Gues The Elo, It is by far the most popular and successful series on his youtube channel.
This is the funniest series on his channel being for moments like him guessing an ELO completely wrong, dramatic games and just moments when high rated players play like low rated players!
There have been 66 Episodes of Guess The Elo up to date, and they are all very entertaining, (Playlist Link)
Coaching
There are definitely a lot of things about GothamChess that you didn't know, one of them could possibly be that he was a former NYC coach! of course, he is a free coach for all of us, all his extensive resources and youtube videos are free! (except chessly, there are free samples though)
I bet a lot of his videos about openings helped you when you were still a beginner! everyone has watched those videos 😂
He is also one that popularized the ultimate bongcloud opening into what it has become!
Early Life
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 5, 1995, and lived in both New York and New Jersey growing up. As a child of Russian immigrants, Rozman grew up speaking Russian as his first language and only started learning English in preschool. He began playing chess at the age of 6 as an extracurricular activity and entered his first tournament at the age of 7.
He attended Baruch College where he completed a Bachelor's degree in statistics and quantitative modelling in 2017. Before focusing on chess as a full-time career, he worked as a client service associate for UBS Wealth Management.
Conclusion
Gothamchess, or as loyal viewers know him as Levy, Is by far the most successful, entertaining and best chess content creator!
Some (like me) would go as far as to say he changed chess forever! He brought thousands if not millions into playing the beautiful game and successfully learning it!
Honourable Mentions to good chess content creators like Levy:
Agadmator
GMHikaru
Eric Rosen
Chess Talk
ChessBase India
BotezLive
Anyways, I'd like to thank all of you that have read this blog to the end for reading my blogs, i hope you like them and its a pleasure to (hopefully) entertain you all. With that, I'll see you all in my next blog!
Credits to BlogChamps for inspiring me to becoming a good blogger, this is my Week 1 submission for Blogchamps Season 3!
