Why is chess getting so popular all of the sudden in 2023?

Does seem like chess epidemic is not only on chess.com: reddit thread about everyone playing chess in school

Chess is also becoming popular in schools.

💀💀💀💀💀💀 THAT MEANS MORE PEOPLE TO DESTROY 💀💀💀💀💀💀

Utub streamer caught my eye...not you know

My school blocked chess because so many people were playing it during class.

I think Chess started being popular in 2020 b/c of COVID19 and everyone had to stay home.

wrong

There was a bump from that and another one during the Queen's Gambit run. More recently, there was another very large increase in interest.

Can remember for sure but didn't poker had a couple of small bumps and got into mainstream awareness before the boom in 00'? It was in a couple well know movies, Rounders being most famous, together with platforms for online poker and television poker where viewers could see the cards and easily follow the game. Then an amateur (Moneymaker) won a lot of money and the rest is history.

Technically, we had some local bumps in India and China where chess became more famous in 2010's. We had a lot of mature online platforms for playing, some even with bells and whistles (or more correctly seasonal bots and achievements) and then pandemic happened. Awareness rose in public due to streamers and Netflix, platforms for playing were already there. Couple of drama, some different mentions by different social media profiles, availability in class room unlike other games and boom, every school child is now playing... until school blocks it.

I hope this ends

Maybe this?

It's become trendy. Your friends are playing it, so you decide to join in, give it a try and start playing them- it may have started with the queen's gambit and the cheating scandal, but it's had a butterfly effect. In schools, trends catch on fast and spread like a virus.

Only a fraction of those who join up are serious about improvement, and that's okay. For everyone else, there is a lot of very watchable, high quality, entertaining chess content being recommended on TikTok and YouTube, and the popularity of that content has caused the algorithms to promote it more widely, so it continues to snowball.

Personally I have no idea why I started playing in October. I had seen the queens gambit probably a year earlier, and I somehow didn't even catch the news about the cheating scandal until after I'd started playing on here daily. I might be an outlier, but I decided to just give it a try to see if I could get good enough to beat my dad, and to feel I'm learning something in my free time rather than wasting it scrolling- and then it was addicting. Needless to say, I can beat my dad, but I have new goals- 1500, then 1800, hopefully by the end of the year. I watch high level games and whilst I'm getting better at following what's happening and predicting the best move, I want to be able to play like that myself- there's really nothing else motivating me. I don't have friends who play and don't plan on entering tournaments.

Before the chess boom, every chess content creator prioritized education over entertainment. Then GothamChess came along. He’s as educational as a rotting goldfish yet as entertaining as a comedy star. He’s one of the top chess youtubers for a reason

I get that repetitive recommendations about chess were around but it would make more

Sense in 2020

I dont like movies about chess. They are so brutally unrealistic.

Hikaru and GothamChess create content daily. It should come at noones surprise that the quality cant be always top notch if you produce this much quantity.