Stella Schwartz, 16, hopped on the chess bandwagon this year after hearing about the game from her older brother, Hugh, a high school senior in San Francisco. Alex Post, a freshman at the University of Colorado, started playing in February, after some chess videos appeared in his TikTok feed; he then got his whole fraternity playing.
Many other teenagers and young adults said that they, too, have recently developed a regular chess habit. By all accounts — from players, parents, teachers, website metrics — the game's popularity has exploded.
Since early November, the number of daily active users to Chess.com, a website and app where visitors can get chess news, learn the game and play against one another and computer opponents, has jumped from 5.4 million to more than 11 million, rising sharply after the beginning of the year.
The biggest growth has come from players 13 to 17 years old — 549,000 visited Chess.com in January and February, more than twice as many as in the two previous months, according to the company. The second-fastest age group in the same period was 18- to 24-year-olds.
"It's everyone, every single day," Stella Schwartz said. "I've seen people play at parties."
Casual observers, as well as newly avid chess players, often attribute the trend to pandemic lockdown and boredom, or perhaps to the popularity of the 2020 Netflix miniseries "The Queen's Gambit." But quietly a grandmaster plan also was unfolding, carefully crafted by Chess.com to broaden the appeal of the game and turn millennials and Generation Z into chess-playing pawns. Were they playing chess, or was chess playing them?
"Everything was targeted right at high school, college and junior high," said Erik Allebest, CEO of Chess.com.
The strategy "was very much deliberate," he said: to erase the perception of chess as a grueling, geeky battle of wits and to package it instead on social media as a less intimidating game. The strategy, simply, was to rebrand it as good old-fashioned fun.