Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chess is booming among teens

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 227 posts

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#31

Post by jrpt »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20

Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…

That was all true ten years ago too so I don’t think that’s it. What changed is the Queen’s Gambit got popular, then covid caused online gaming to become even more popular, and then there were some things that made chess popular recently like chess boxing with streamers on YouTube.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#32

Post by jrpt »

BurningFrog wrote: post #24
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20

Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…

The biggest thing is that now you can find someone of similar strength to play with in 20 seconds!!

You could do that 10-15 years ago too though. Chess.com has been around a long time.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#34

Post by creakingstairs »

raincole wrote: post #30
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20

Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…

My question about online chess is: why aren't people feeling that their opponents are cheating? I don't play chess. But in other online games, like FPS, the players always complain about cheaters. Then why isn't it a problem with chess.com? It's much easier to cheat with online chess than an FPS game, no?

In lower Elos, it’s pretty obvious if the other user is cheating, so the platforms seem to detect them pretty well.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#35

Post by osener »

sidibe wrote: post #14
sdwr wrote: post #3

This is wild. Chess feels old-school and boring to me. Don't understand how it's competing with modern sources of entertainment.

I've never been interested in chess because it seemed to be way too much work to be good enough to have fun. Things have gotten much easier now, you can get endless stream of free puzzles that are as fun as any puzzle game and adapt to your skill level... I'm still not that interested in actually playing but it's really the ultimate single player game for phones, always slightly challenging and takes as little or as…

Which app is best for this single player variety of chess? Focusing on bite sized puzzles etc.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#36

Post by bobmaxup »

AITree wrote: post #29

The game of chess has always been popular, but recently it has attracted a lot of interest because of the success of Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit" series. People of all ages, especially teens, have taken a newfound interest in the game as a result of the presentation.

Characters on fantasical drugs having superhuman abilities?

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#37

Post by hannob »

I've recently started playing chess again a bit (after doing it a bit when I was a teen), and there's an interesting aspect of online chess that I began to realize: When I was young you needed a local opponent to play chess, and that wasn't always easy. Why? Because most people around you were either significantly better (you always loose) or worse (you always win). It's not an interesting game if the outcome is almost always the same.

It's obviously a complete gamechanger when you have a plattform like chess.com which automatically figures out how good you are and matches you with a roughly equally skilled opponent.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#38

Post by niederman »

I am a high schooler in the US who's played chess for around 4 years now. Chess has been popular at my school since COVID (perhaps 1/20 people played it), but around February of this year it suddenly exploded in popularity to maybe 1/5 people. I have no idea why.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#39

Post by largepeepee »

AITree wrote: post #29

The game of chess has always been popular, but recently it has attracted a lot of interest because of the success of Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit" series. People of all ages, especially teens, have taken a newfound interest in the game as a result of the presentation.

Sure Netflix played a part but a larger portion of the growth was probably from popular twitch streamers/YouTubers who picked up the hobby and brought their young communities with them to chess tournaments vs other similar streamers etc in recent years.

It's become like a social status among people to have a decent elo, a horrible marker for intelligence but a growing popular one.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#40

Post by hannob »

raincole wrote: post #30
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20

Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…

My question about online chess is: why aren't people feeling that their opponents are cheating? I don't play chess. But in other online games, like FPS, the players always complain about cheaters. Then why isn't it a problem with chess.com? It's much easier to cheat with online chess than an FPS game, no?

The question is: Do I care? Particularly if I'm not super-competitive.

I play chess irregularly on a not very sophisticated level (ELO ~400). I get automatically assigned opponents. Sure, it's possible that some of them cheat. It's probably not super attractive, because I'm not sure what the fun is in "I beat random ELO 400 player on chess.com with a computer". So maybe one in a few dozend games I face a cheater.

If you get into much more competitive chess then people probably cheat more. But I guess for the vast majority of players it doesn't matter.

Post reply on HN