It’s doing pretty well as a spectator’s sport. Look at Hikaru Nakamura’s stream on a typical night. Thousands of viewers. He recently joined a major esports tea

It’s doing pretty well as a spectator’s sport. Look at Hikaru Nakamura’s stream on a typical night. Thousands of viewers. He recently joined a major esports team (TSM). His finals match against Magnus Carlsen was up over 30k viewers at some points. Now how many of those viewers play chess themselves? Quite a few, I think. Chess.com and Lichess are booming. Tons of low rated players playing all the time. Another big, emerging phenomenon is Pogchamps, an online invitational chess tournament featuring top streamers of other games. These streamers tend to be very low rated in chess and they receive coaching from IMs and GMs such as the aforementioned Hikaru. In addition to the excitement around the tournament itself, a lot of people tune in to watch their favourite streamers get coached by the pros. It can be very entertaining to see a normally cocky streamer get humbled in chess.