[ehsankia]

To me it seems like the current explosion is the genius idea of pitching the most famous Twitch personalities against each other in a tournament. This is similar to how Dr. K blew up by giving live therapy session to Twitch personalities with huge followings. If you add up the followers of all the participants [0], you already have a huge pool of probably over a million viewers to start with, all rooting for their favorite streamer.

[0] https://www.chess.com/article/view/chesscom-pogchamps

[jmcgough]

It also makes chess way more approachable to see novice players play and see GMs discuss why a move is good or bad. I picked up chess about two weeks ago from watching the tourney, and the streams where GMs give lessons to tournament participants (or even random popular streamers) have been pretty helpful for someone who never really understood the strategy of the early game as a kid.