Soccer Players Jump Into Booming Chess World

Chess Captures Internet Attention

Haaland and Pique aren’t just investing because they see chess as a fun pastime. The game has become a hot property in the past decade. A miniseries called The Queen’s Gambit was a smashing success on Netflix. Online streamers such as U.S. grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and Sweden’s Anna Cramling have millions of followers on Twitch and YouTube. And just as video games helped push soccer’s popularity in the USA, online play has created a chess boom, with about 44 million U.S. players at Chess.com alone. Globally, Chess.com has more than 270 million members.

One reason streaming and online play has succeeded is that the chess world has finally embraced the notion of playing quickly. For about 100 years since the first world champion (Wilhelm Steinitz) was recognized in the 1880s, the chess community scoffed at “speed chess,” in which each player has only a few minutes of thinking time to use over the course of a game. The world’s best players and teachers insisted that playing quickly instilled bad habits and ruined the concentration and calculation skills required to win “real” chess games lasting several hours. When international governing body FIDE introduced a world championship in “active chess,” in which each player had 30 minutes to use, world champion Garry Kasparov quipped that the existence of an “active” world champion would make him a “passive” champion.

Today, world champions are recognized in three major disciplines. “Classical” chess is the traditional game, though it’s still faster than it used to be. In world championship matches in the mid- to late 20th century, players had 2½ hours each for 40 moves, and then they would pause and resume the next day with an hour for every subsequent set of 16 moves. Today, with digital clocks that can add time for every move, classical chess time controls have been cut down to 1½ hours for 40 moves, then 30 minutes the rest of the way in addition to 30 extra seconds per move. The other disciplines are “rapid” chess, with world championship players getting 15 minutes for the game plus 10 seconds per move, and “blitz” chess, with a mere three minutes on the clock plus two seconds per move. The Total Chess World Championship in which Haaland has invested seeks to crown an overall champion in the three disciplines.

The notion that players will ruin their “classical” prowess by playing rapid and blitz games is undercut by a look at the ratings. Carlsen is the top men’s player in all three disciplines. Nakamura’s habit of playing blitz or other fast games on his live streams while maintaining conversations with people in his chat hasn’t hurt him — he’s No. 3 in the world in blitz, No. 5 in rapid, and tied for second in classical.

USA Chases Chess Championships

Nakamura isn’t alone in putting the USA at the forefront of the chess boom. He’s tied with fellow U.S. player Fabiano Caruana in the classical rankings, where Wesley So is sixth and three more U.S. players are in the top 25. Levon Aronian is second in the world in rapid chess. In the junior rankings, Andy Woodward is seventh overall and is the second-youngest player in the top 10, while Abhimanyu Mishra is fourth in rapid and Christopher Woojin Yoo is fifth in blitz. Alice Lee is the No. 1 junior girl in rapid chess, with Rachel Li just two places back.

And just a few months after the U.S. men’s soccer team captured national interest in the World Cup, the U.S. chess team is ready for action in the Chess Olympiad, which features head-to-head contests between four players from each nation. The men, led by Caruana and So (Nakamura isn’t participating), were silver medalists behind India in 2024 and enter the September event ranked No. 1 in the world. The women took bronze in 2024, with Carissa Yip taking 10 points in 11 games, and are seeded fifth this year.