Elitism in chess

that's your opinion

After my match!!!!

So Ben Finegold's Twitch stream was pulled?

Anybody know about past Twitch bans and how often people come back from them?

It's too bad. GM Finegold was doing a lot of quality streaming recently.  His Twitch subscriber numbers reflected that- having doubled recently. (Obviously, Hikaru has many more but 2,000 subscribers is nothing to sneeze at in chess.)

Ben doesn't hate people learning chess. He's done more to teach chess and spread the game than just about any GM on the planet. What Ben doesn't like are rich, idiodic esport losers known for making racist and homophobic comments, as well as the washed up, declining, fame chasing super GM who fan-boys over them. (Hikaru Nakamura)

Saying xQc was "learning" chess is stretching it a bit.

IIRC he lost all his games in the first pogchamps (almost all the players were beginners and he still lost), including getting mated in under 10 moves vs MoistCr1tikal.

Even before that, his reputation was for being loud, dumb, and sanctioned due to homophobic hate speech.

Oh, but let's not say one bad thing about him, because that's "elitist" 

I'm glad you weren't too busy virtue signaling with evergreen statements ("Chess should be accessible to everyone") that you forgot to hawk your social media.

Barf.

Lol

Llama, I was thinking exactly the same thing.

The OP has misunderstood the meaning of elitism and is using it incorrectly. That's why it doesn't make sense.

Elitism does exist over the board, especially against women in various countries.  However, poor sportsmanship is a bigger problem.

How many non-scholastic OTB tournament games have you played?

I think you have confused elitism and sexism. What countries do you have experience of?

I suppose my main complaint is this...

If xQc (or any of his fans, or other pogchamp players, etc) showed up to a chess club, anywhere in the world, there's a greater than 99% chance they'd be warmly welcomed. People would answer questions, and wish them luck with their games. Chess players like chess enthusiasts because by and large chess players are chess enthusiasts themselves. We're not making money on chess. We play because we love it, and if you love it too, then you're one of us.

But in general the players and fans of pogchamps are not chess enthusiasts. They're entertainers looking for a new act to make some money, and their viewers are an audience looking to be entertained. Similarly when chess.com promotes pogchamps they're not promoting chess (other than perhaps tangentially), they're looking to make money... and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what businesses do. That's what audiences do. But don't get indignant on people like Ben Finegold who point out you're not part of the community, because you never were. xQc doesn't like chess, he likes viewers, and the people who watch xQc don't like chess, they like watching xQc.

Sure some people cross over. Some people come to like chess via these business transactions, and like I said at the beginning, to those people, chess players all over the world say "welcome!" But to the others, particularly those who want to self righteously attack people like Finegold, you can #$%^ off

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And I think time has shown this to be true... the fact that this issue of elitism was forgotten as suddenly as it appeared shows that it was manufactured outrage.

And as for Hikaru being a ____ rider, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone over the age of 12 who has watched his YouTube channel that that's on the nose. Fawning over retired e-sports personalities like they're royalty, and in general carefully using sanitized speech while having no opinion on anything remotely controversial... it's like I'm watching someone running for congress, it's disgusting, and just to maximize his subscriber count.

Which is fine... he's trying to make money online and I'm obviously not part of his target audience, but again, don't manufacture outrage against Finegold for speaking the truth.