I started playing chess regularly about six months ago. I'm still terrible, if we're being honest, but I've been chipping away at it, and I even bought a smart chessboard to help me learn faster.
Growing up, chess had a reputation as the hobby of choice for kids with broken glasses and pocket protectors. I never touched a chessboard as a kid. Now, I love it. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled on a report from Axios informing me that chess is now "young and hip."
According to Axios, "The pandemic, pop culture and a wave of content creators have turned a centuries-old game into a Gen Z phenomenon."
Apparently, I'm cooler than I thought. Who knew?
Levy Rozman, the 30-year-old chess master and educator known online as GothamChess, told Axios exactly what I always suspected about this hobby. "It was not the coolest thing in the world to be a chess player" when he was growing up, Rozman said. "Nowadays, kids come up to me who love chess and they look like they would've bullied me in school."
That's quite a turnaround.
Chess livestreamers like Rozman now have real audiences. There are chess dating clubs, chess nights at bars, and even chess romance subplots showing up on television, which is kinda crazy. Rozman said his YouTube audience went from roughly 99% male in 2020 to more than 10% female today, and viewers of his "How To Play Chess" video are now about 25% female.
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Younger people are now more likely than their elders to play chess, according to recent YouGov data. As of June 1, there were 6.4 million active U.S. Chess.com players, up from 4 million on the same date the year before, according to data shared with Axios. I joined Chess.com last year, and for the past couple of months, I've been meeting up with a friend at Starbucks to play a game in person.
There was also nearly a 10% increase in chess experiences on Eventbrite nationally from 2024 to 2025, the ticketing platform told Axios. Meanwhile, chess grandmasters keep getting younger, which either means kids are getting smarter or I'm getting older. Probably both.
Axios traces the spike back to 2020, when millions of people stuck at home rediscovered the game online. The Netflix series The Queen's Gambit also helped. Some time after I watched it, I backed a Kickstarter campaign for a smart chessboard, which I now own and love. It teaches you how to play and has self-moving pieces, which still feels like something out of Harry Potter.
Self-moving pieces: MAGIC! pic.twitter.com/2qT0gxjbpe
— Particula (@goparticula) May 28, 2023
Rozman also offered some insight into what the game actually reveals about the person playing it. "If you're impatient, or too aggressive, or you have too much of an ego, or you're bad at regulating your stress and emotion," he said, "chess kind of exposes this and challenges you to fix it."
I can vouch for that. For me, chess is brain exercise, plain and simple. It's also addictive. I regularly catch myself sneaking in a game on Chess.com when I should be writing here. It's become a bit of a problem lately, and I'm working on it.
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