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by hellodang
2011 days ago
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I question how much buzz about chess lately is the direct result of a certain Netflix Original. The effects seem to cascade. Chess blog posts on HN... a flood of sales of Chinese chess sets on Amazon... game night pics featuring chess on your social media feeds. How much of our behavior is dictated, or at least seeded, by Big Ns? |
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With the pandemic there was a huge influx of new chess players. You can see it in [0], the player count rose over 50% from February to April.
After that chess suddenly got popular on Twitch as well, which I would attribute mostly to GM Hikaru, who played chess together with well known streamers such as xqc. That rise is well visible in June/July [1] in the twitch chess category.
Queen's Gambit was just recently released (end of October). This of course led to chess being even more popular, but I wouldn't attribute all the chess posts to it. I maybe would even go so far and attribute it partly to frequency illusion [2], now that you're watching out more for chess posts I assume.
[0] Games played per month on lichess (open source chess server): https://database.lichess.org/
[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/743
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion