Is Chess the Next Big eSport?♟️| Extra Credits Gaming

Chess. The strategy game that's like if Warhammer had way fewer pieces and it was rude to paint them. In its current form, chess is at least hundreds of years old. In fact, the oldest chess game on record was between two guys named Francisco de Castellvi and Narciso Vinyoles played all the way back in the year 1475 and I'm very thankful they're not alive to tell me how much I butchered their names. And since around the 1500s, chess has not changed mechanically one bit. No patch notes, no new characters, no Disney movie tie-ins. Meaning if you want to know the plot point of how Palpatine is back alive in Star Wars, then chess.com is not the place you want to look. Though in fairness, chess is also kind of like Super Smash Bros. Melee. A new version may come around every so often, but the people who like the original are more than happy to just keep playing the OG. Also, both games revolve around a king. So, I think we can all agree that chess is one of the all-time great games. Heck, it's 100 years older than Galileo and people are still playing it all the time. But what if chess was more than just an ancient board game? What if we told you chess might be the next big esport? Is that possible? Well, let's

make our way from our opening to the middle game and find out. But before we sacrifice our bishop, we need to thank another delightful game for helping make today's discussion possible. Doomlings. But more on that and these adorable little chaos gremlins after the episode. Real quick up top, please welcome Jeremy Kaplowitz who guest wrote this episode and sparked a rabbit hole I did not know I would super enjoy falling down. Thanks so much, Jeremy. Okay, chess the next big esport? Come on, what's next? Competitive Neopets at the Olympics? Actually, but that sounds rad. Either way, before we get into it, let's define what makes something a popular esport. Our criteria for this are as follows. One, be a popular video game. Two, have a high skill ceiling. Three, be intuitive and fun for viewers who don't know the game well, but also deep and nuanced for those who do. And four, have big personalities and storylines. So, let's start with number one. Is chess a popular video game? Of course, chess is traditionally a board game, and if you want to be annoying, and I often do, you

could also call it a tabletop game. But, in the last few years, how folks play chess has changed a lot. With the pandemic forcing everyone to become indoor kids, and the popularity of Netflix's The Queen's Gambit, chess not only blew up on Twitch, but has also adapted to its new digs. Because while traditional over-the-board chess is slow and calculated, in online chess, blitz and bullet tournaments, aka much faster formats, reign supreme. And this is the version of chess that's becoming an e-sport. It features quick games, high replayability, explosive action, and of course two nerdy people in gaming chairs playing against each other across the internet. I mean, if that's not a video game, I don't really know what is. So, Zoe, I think it's safe to check that one off the list. Let's move on to number two. Does chess have a high skill ceiling? I mean, obviously, yes. After all, being good at chess is like a cheat code for a character in a movie to look smart. But, online chess also specifically has a high skill ceiling in the same way that other e-sports do. In fact, it's kind of skill ceiling all the way down. Okay, think about it like this. Chess players always start with

equal pieces, right? Meaning there's no randomness, and there's only one map. Even a notably high-skill game like Magic the Gathering does have built-in randomness. However, in chess, you can never lose a chess game because you did something like accidentally draw all pawns, and you can certainly never lose a chess game because you made a bad dice roll. Hence, all skill, no RNG. But, what about testing that skill under pressure? Well, online chess tournaments include very interesting formats, like one where players have a set amount of time, say 15 minutes, to play as many bullet games as they can. And whoever has the most points by the end is the winner. So, without changing a single rule to the base game, this opens up really interesting new strategies players can use, like running out the clock with slow moves, or purposely going for draws when they're up a point. And if you're worried that chess doesn't sound, you know, e-sporty enough yet, let's take a a and talk about APM, or actions per minute. People love to say that chess is a solved game, that it's just about memorizing openings and hitting an eventual draw. But in online chess, the APM really matters because

try remembering 20 moves in a cheesy opening when you start with just 2 minutes on the clock, right? Try maneuvering a draw position against a speed chess champion when you have 3 seconds on the clock and you're desperately pre-moving just to stay alive. Try figuring out a winning end game when you're up a piece and your crafty opponent keeps trying to trick you into a stalemate. That's a ton of actions per minute, meaning bullet and blitz chess has not just macro needs, but also intense and stressful micro ones. And the stress of an e-sport level skill requirement isn't just reserved for top players because with the rise of places like the massively popular chess.com, any player gets to experience all the ladder anxiety of chess without ever having to leave their home to play against people in the real world. Hell, chess is so synonymous with skill that a guy named Arpad Elo invented a whole rating system specifically to help differentiate chess skill between players and tons of other games have adopted it as well. We've actually mentioned this in previous episodes, but an additional side note, Elo is not an acronym. So, it's not like E L O, it's the guy's name. Moving on to number three. Is chess intuitive for new

players and is it deep enough for experienced ones? Let's tackle that second question first, shall we? Chess is surely a deep enough game for experienced players, full stop. Despite thousands of years of play, the game continues to evolve with new found strategies. But for new players, online chess is also extremely intuitive and watchable. And no joke, I just discovered this recently when Jeremy was writing the script. It is super entertaining. Tournaments feature terrific shoutcasters, often grandmasters themselves, who do an amazing job of quickly explaining options and strategies going through the heads of players as they make their moves. Chess, like StarCraft or League, can obviously be a very complicated game and color commentators do the hard work of translating that for viewers. But there are also other fun ways that newbies like myself can get involved in the action. Okay, backing up for a minute. Remember Deep Blue, the computer that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 in what future historians will agree was the very beginning of the robot apocalypse? Well, now we have something called Stockfish, the far more powerful chess engine that

easily fits on your phone. And through Stockfish, chess has something that no other game has, the great and POWERFUL EVAL BAR. SORRY, I SHOULDN'T HAVE DONE THE EVIL laugh there. It's actually eval. There's no morality tied to the name of this thing. Online chess very often includes this bar on the side of the screen that shows very precisely who is winning the game in real time. It is a blast to watch the eval bar slowly creep up in favor of one player as they chisel away at their opponent, and it's incredibly exciting to see that eval bar swing back in favor of the other player when someone makes a terrible blunder or brilliant counter move. It is awesome, and it helps me out so much. Because after all, both e-sports and p-sports, what I call physical sports, are way more fun when everyone knows who is in the lead, and there's people to root for, which brings us to our final requirement. Number four, does chess have big personalities and storylines? For any game to be interesting to watch and follow, you need to have things like players to root for, players to root against, underdogs, rivals, and big

exciting events. And you can't talk about the rise of online chess without the rise of the chess content creator. There's educational players like Levy Rozman and Agadmator. There's chaotic content creators like the Botez sisters. And there's ruthless competitors like Hikaru Nakamura. Even players from the classical chess world like the indisputably best chess player alive, Magnus Carlsen, makes it feel like seeing Darth Vader show up when his name appears on the other end of the board in a high-level streamer. And all of these players and content creators help push the game in new directions and grow massive communities around it. Of course, you can have all the fun and positivity you want, but is a video game really an e-sport unless people care enough about it to create big silly drama? Well, chess has definitely had its fair share of scandals in the last few years. I mean, how great can your game be if no one's ever tried to cheat in it? There's been a bunch, but I'll just recount one story to give the uninitiated a taste. Back in 2022, a 20-year-old hotshot named Hans Niemann was accused by Magnus of cheating and then responded simply by saying, "{quote} The chess speaks for itself."

He then became the butt of the joke when fans began to theorize he had stuck a cheating device up his rectum that vibrated to tell him the right moves. And while that's neither here nor up there, the point is you simply cannot have a sport without having people to root for, people to root against, and these larger-than-life stories that help give additional emotional context to everything surrounding the game itself, no matter how silly that might be. So, yeah, chess, despite its humble origins as an ancient board game, war strategy trainer, and wheat-based medieval math puzzle, is quickly becoming one of the most popular online video games to play and watch because it has complicated skill-based play, electrifying matches, and fan-worthy players. All without a single patch note since the Middle Ages. So, yeah, I'm going to say chess is definitely a very popular e-sport. And it's growing. So, look out, League of Legends. Look out, Valorant. Look out, Overwatch, if you're still around, because it feels like you're all about to get en passant from the nerds over at the chess club, because we're going to

use our flight card to swap hands with Jeremy, then discard until my new hand equals the current gene pool. HA, NAILED IT. WAIT, HOLD ON A MINUTE. ZOEY, DID YOU SWITCH OUT THE chessboard with Doomlings again? Okay, stop me if you've heard this one. You're sitting down for your weekly gaming group, right? But no one can decide what game to play. Some are feeling a rules-heavy crunch-a-thon. Some want a light game with minor story elements, and some just want the game to start. That's usually me. Well, I'm very glad to have found something that's been keeping everyone at my gaming table very happy these days, Doomlings. A light-hearted, cheeky card game that has the easy setup of Uno, the whimsical feel of Pokémon, and strategic components like Munchkin that can keep all types of players invested. Seriously, I can't believe it works as well as it does. That's because Doomlings really focuses on having fun together at the table by letting players use cards to evolve traits of these adorable little Doomlings over the ages before the world ends in catastrophe and you declare a winner. They even have a Doomlings in 60 seconds video that can onboard everybody super quickly so you can spend less time learning rules and

more time Doomlings-ing. That's the verb, right? And now is the best time to try out Doomlings for yourself because for a limited time, if you head to doomlings.com and use code extra20, you'll get 20% off your entire order. So, click or scan here to invite the Doomlings to your gaming table. Then, once you've played a trade or two, check out our next video here. In a world where Angelo Valenciana, Arclight Games, Dominic Valenciana, Box Dock, Hunter C, Easy Coin, Juice Up, Blame, and Kuya Koy are legendary patrons. I mean, that's a world I want to live in.