3 ms·

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

• Dumbdo 6y ago
  As someone who is following chess more intensively for over two years now, I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Netflix. 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/ https://database.lichess.org/ [1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/743 https://twitchtracker.com/games/743 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
  • hellodang 6y ago
    Cool, I never heard of frequency illusion. I experience it all the time.