Stella Schwartz, 16, hopped on the chess bandwagon earlier this year after hearing about the game from her older brother, Hugh, a high school senior in San Francisco. Alex Post, a freshman at the University of Colorado, started playing in February, after some chess-related videos appeared in his TikTok feed; then he got his whole fraternity playing.

Many other teenagers and young adults said that they too had recently developed a regular chess habit, although they could not recall how it started. But by all accounts – from players, parents, teachers, website metrics – the game’s popularity has exploded.

Since early November, the number of daily active users to Chess.com, a website and app where visitors can get chess news, learn the game and play against one another and computer opponents, has jumped from 5.4 million to more than 11 million, rising sharply after the beginning of the year.

(In December, Chess.com also purchased the Play Magnus Group, a company started by chess world champion Magnus Carlsen that includes a mobile chess app.)

The biggest growth has come from players who are 13 to 17 years old – 549,000 visited Chess.com in January and February, more than twice as many as in the two months prior, according to a company estimate of traffic. The second-fastest age group in the same period was 18- to 24-year-olds.

“It’s everyone, every single day,” Schwartz said. “I’ve seen people play at parties.”

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Casual observers, as well as newly avid chess players, may attribute the trend to pandemic lockdown and boredom, or perhaps to the popularity of the 2020 Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. But quietly a grandmaster plan was also unfolding, carefully crafted by Chess.com to broaden the appeal of the game and turn millennials and Generation Z into chess-playing pawns. Were they playing chess, or was chess playing them?

“Everything was targeted right at high school, college and junior high,” said Erik Allebest, chief executive officer of Chess.com.

Happenstance – Covid-19, word-of-mouth, the handsomeness of Carlsen – played a part. From February 2020 to February 2021, usage on Chess.com apps leaped from around 1.5 million daily active users to around 4.5 million.

Behind the scenes, Chess.com was working to change the game’s image and attract new players. This was good for business. Although the app allows users to play for free, its financial model relies on charging for tiers of service, from US$6.99 to US$16.99 per month for additional features such as instructional videos and computer analysis of a player’s games and moves. The strategy, simply, was to rebrand chess as good old-fashioned fun.

“When I was a kid, chess was for nerds,” Allebest said. “We started selling the enjoyment of chess and community more than just the top players and news of top players. ”

In 2020, the site started hosting tournaments with online influencers who were not particularly adept at chess but had large followings among young people. These included xQc, a professional video game player and streamer; Ludwig, an esports streamer; MoistCr1TiKal, another streamer and commentator; and Mr Beast, a 24-year-old YouTube sensation with 147 million subscribers.

Chess.com allows users to play against other people of their own skill level or against computer programs of various levels, including artificial-intellience opponents that have names and personalities and can be outspoken.

Fabigi, described by Chess.com as a “hard-working Italian American plumber”, is an advanced beginner. Boshi, portrayed as a long-haired human with a reptile body, plays at the beginner level and is “everyone’s favourite dinosaur sidekick”, according to a Chess.com description.

But the mother of all Chess.com bots, introduced only for the month of January, was Mittens, an anime-esque tabby cat with big green eyes that look a little sad. Mittens was advertised by Chess.com as having a chess rating of one – the worst. In reality, Mittens was a stone-cold killer with a sadistic streak.

Mittens was created with world-class skills and was unlikely to lose against the world’s top grandmasters. Mittens played slowly, appearing to give the opponent a chance while muttering odd and obnoxious taunts. (“Meow, I am become Mittens, destroyer of kings.”)

“We made it strong enough to beat virtually every human player in the world, but not quickly,” said Mike Klein, the chief chess officer of ChessKid.com, which is a part of the Chess.com company.

In January, 40 million games were played against Mittens, which Slate described in a headline at the time as “the evil cat bot destroying players’ souls”.

End game

Klein has been travelling the US trying to convince schools to include chess in the curriculum. He argues that chess is good for the brain, but he concedes that the scientific studies he invokes, linking chess with better performance on standardised tests, “are pretty old or don’t have a good control group or are not a large enough sample size”.

Whether chess offers anything more valuable than other online games do is unclear, said Michael Rich, an associate professor of paediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the Digital Wellness Lab, which studies the health aspects of technology use. It all depends, he said, on whether someone is playing with patience, and to learn, or just for quick digital thrills.

Schwartz, the high school sophomore in San Francisco, said that she generally avoided playing in class and that it did benefit her brain. “Chess is a smart game,” she said.

Her mother, Emily Stegner-Schwartz, agreed. “I’d rather she play chess than, what’s that game, Jewel Crusher or Candy Land,” she said, referring to the game Candy Crush. Online chess “is to chess what pickleball is to tennis”, she said.

Her son, Hugh, the high school senior, could not recall what first got him playing on Chess.com earlier this year – friends, maybe? “I don’t know, it’s weird,” he said. Now he plays twice a day. And if there was a corporate strategy to capture him, did it really matter?

“Everybody is manipulating people now on social media,” he said. “Chess is not the worst thing to be manipulated into.” NYTIMES