Is the Boom in Chess Popularity a Good Thing?

When I was growing up, it seemed like everyone in the chess community agreed that growing the game of chess was a good thing. After all, the Fischer boom in the 1970s brought more people into the game and increased prize funds for top players. Many strong players were a product of this kind of surge in popularity and it seemed like the talent pool was increasing. More chess clubs cropped up. More tournaments became available for amateurs. It seemed like everyone in the ecosystem benefitted from the increased popularity.  

More recently, we have had a few surges in chess popularity and it seems that overall interest is at an all time high. Events like the pandemic and the release of the Queen's Gambit show on Netflix brought more and more players into chess. Platforms like Chess.com were able to accommodate the increase in demand while content creators attracted even more people with viral clips/videos. Looking at Chess.com memberships alone, the site reached 100 million members in December of 2022:

By April 2025, that number doubled to 200 million members on Chess.com. All of this growth in popularity is a good thing, right? In my view, there are pros and cons.

Advantages of the Current Chess Boom

While the surge in popularity of chess has not brought about all good changes in my opinion, there are still some undeniable positives. Here are a few I can think of:

1. Chess is a wonderful game and the more people that can share the joy of the game is a net positive
2. Top players are getting stronger and stronger, while players at all levels see more diverse competition
3. Growing chess makes it more commercially viable and puts more money in professional player's pockets
4. Having more chess players gives more work to chess coaches and other chess professionals that are not good enough to solely play professionally
5. Chess fans can enjoy following more top tournaments than ever before, both online and OTB

Despite the list of advantages mentioned above, I believe there are some serious disadvantages to having so many new players brought in all at once. 

Newer Players do not Understand Top-Level Chess

Chess fans, like in any other sport, enjoy watching the best of the best compete at the highest level. Experienced players can appreciate just how hard it is to play well, while newer players lack this same appreciation. I attribute some of this to the power of the engine which can instantly make even the best in the world look foolish. Any move looks obvious after the engine shows it to us, which creates a mentality that blunders are easier to avoid than they really are. Engine biases aside, weaker players underestimate chess in general. This is a good example of the dunning kruger effect.

I don't appreciate when strong grandmasters are dismissed as weak players because they lose a few games to the world's elite. To take a recent example of this, here are the results of the 2024 Candidates Tournament:

Nijat Abasov was the lowest rated player by far, with a rating of only 2632. He finished in last place with 3.5/14 points, failing to win a single game. Many people see this result and conclude that Abasov is a weak player, which is simply not true. They review his games with an engine which shows he made lots of mistakes and this reinforces this false narrative. Casual players don't understand that in reality he would crush most people without breaking a sweat. I would include myself in that statistic and I'm already in the 99.9 percentile on chess.com.

Another common misconception I see about top level events has to do with single game results. In other sports, if player A beats player B in a game, it is often safe to assume that player A is better than player B. That is not necessarily true in chess, which is why World Championship matches are played with many games to help ensure the best player wins. For example, whenever Gukesh beats Carlsen in a single game, I see endless comments about how Gukesh has now surpassed Carlsen and that Carlsen is finished. If you zoom out and compare both players results over a longer period of time, that narrative lacks any substantial support. 

As someone who can appreciate just how talented all the top GMs are, it kills me that people with a fraction of their skill write them off as weak.

Chess Content is getting Dumbed Down

Without looking it up, do you know what the average rating on chess.com is across all users? 1500? Maybe 1000? As of 9/26/2025, here is where it stands:

Blitz:

Bullet: 

Rapid:

That's right, over blitz, bullet, and rapid time controls on chess.com (which I use because it has such a large sample size of players) the average rating is around 600. That means that 50% of all players are weaker than 600! To make this statistic even more extraordinary, chess.com rating is highly inflated compared to USCF or FIDE rating, usually to the tune of 200-400 points. For example, my USCF rating is 2200 whereas my online bullet rating is 2600. 

Now I don't have a problem with most players being weak. After all, we all start somewhere. But in order to accommodate this new audience, chess content has to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Take for example Levy Rozman aka GothemChess. I know he is the most popular chess content creator out there, but personally I cannot stand his videos (apologies to his fans ). His content emphasizes sensationalism, hyperbole, and drama (which is often exaggerated). I understand this is what gets views on the internet, but it takes away some of the serious nature of the game, which is something that has always attracted me to chess. It's also not just GothemChess that is guilty of this. Just about all the top streamers/youtubers push similar styles of content. While good content still exists for stronger players, it's become more niche and harder to find.

Discourse on Chess Forums is a Mess

If you ever want to find the worst takes on anything on the internet, a good place to start is a message board on chess.com. Whether it's a debate about who the best players are or what to do in case of the latest controversy, all nuance goes out the window. 

The problem is that the voices of the weakest players are loudest. For example, if the topic is "what does Ding Liren need to do in order to come back in his World Championship Match against Nepomniachtchi", I simply don't want to hear what the 500 rated players have to say. This may seem harmless in the last example I gave, but what if instead the topic was "did Player A cheat?" People who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about love to give their opinions on these topics and it ruins any nuanced discourse that could be had. In the case of cheating, it could even hurt people's reputation if a false accusation catches on to ignorant masses since they cannot think about chess in a constructive way on their own. 

Conclusions

I could go on much longer on why the growth of chess has hurt the community, but I need to end this somewhere. I know many will conclude that I am something of a chess snob, and that may be a fair assessment! But I also think there are objective problems with casual fans entering the community and making snap judgements about things they are not qualified to have opinions about. At least it's not all bad. I stand by the positives that the latest chess boom has given us. It would just be nice to return to a time where analyzing high-level games was the main focus instead of wondering what kind of music a top player likes to listen to.