Within minutes of D Gukesh throwing in the towel in Game 12 of the World Chess Championship, Hikaru Nakamura is live on a stream offering his post mortem of a body that is yet to get cold.
Ranked No.3 in the world, Nakamura finished second at the Candidates tournament, just missing out on being in Gukesh’s chair as the challenger to world champion Ding Liren. Now, as the 18-year-old Indian fights against the Chinese grandmaster for a chance to become the youngest-ever world champion, the American grandmaster — who likes to say that his main profession is streaming rather than playing chess — is at hand to offer insights into the contest in Singapore.
Occasionally, like when Gukesh rejected a draw offer from Ding and the game continued longer than anticipated, Nakamura was streaming even while the game was on. Then, for good measure after every game, his team cuts a separate clip where he analyses the performance of journalists at the post-game press conference.
After finishing his stream for Game 12, Nakamura joins former world champion Magnus Carlsen to form a dream team – or a stream team – to give more of his views, this time for Carlsen’s new app called Take Take Take, which was launched just in time for the World Chess Championship.
Here, I explained @chesscom ‘s tweet. #DingGukesh pic.twitter.com/tUaJMu0D00
— Hikaru Nakamura (@GMHikaru) December 8, 2024
Carlsen, the man who willingly abdicated the world champion’s throne last year without a shot being fired on the chessboard, has been at hand to offer his insights on the app after every game. Some days, his busy schedule doesn’t allow him to watch the entire game. But he does record these recaps, where he offers an unsparing and unfiltered opinion of the action. Among Carlsen’s zingers are: “This does look like a world championship game, but not a match from this century” and “I used to say that chess players should be somewhere between optimistic and delusional. This clearly was on the delusional side for Gukesh”.
Carlsen is not the only former world champion to offer insights on the contest. There’s also Vladimir Kramnik, the curmudgeonly Russian, who alternates between doing video analysis and tweeting about the quality of the ongoing match.
After every few moves, chess legend Susan Polgar posts her views in real-time on X describing how the game is going: a human evaluation bar of sorts not just for each game as it takes place, but also the overall match situation later on. As she memorably tweeted after Game 12: “Someone please report brutality on the board! Where has this Ding been in the last 2 years? This is Ding’s best game in the past 2 years.”
Over on Chess24 livestream, Susan’s sister Judit joins the commentary panel, where there are already strong grandmasters like Peter Leko and Daniel Naroditsky offering move-by-move commentary.
Chess is a rare sport in that sense, where most of the live coverage can be caught on YouTube streaming rather than on OTT platforms and television screens (the uncertainty about how long a game will last makes it tricky for TV where broadcast slots have to be reserved).
The 2024 World Chess Championship is possibly the most analysed chess match in history in real time. (FIDE via Eng Chin An)
Biggest clash ever
But even then, the 2024 world chess championship is possibly the most analysed chess match in history in real time. And for a reason! With the warriors in the middle belonging to the two most populous nations in the world, interest in the Gukesh vs Ding battle is at an all-time high.
Just as Carlsen and Nakamura combined forces for the Game 12 recap, ChessBase India and chess.com India have been jointly live-streaming games with stand-up comics like Samay Raina and Biswa Kalyan Rath joining in, besides regular commentators like Sagar Shah and Tania Sachdev. The joint broadcast has also had five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, Arjun Erigaisi and Anish Giri hopping on virtually during broadcasts.
As one of the Ding vs Gukesh games entered the dreary middle-game phase where things tend to become glacially slow, Vidit Gujrathi made an appearance with his fiancee Nidhi, just a couple of days after the couple had announced their engagement.
Almost every ChessBase India and chess.com joint live stream on YouTube for the 12 games so far has touched over a million views, with Game 7 having two million. One of the broadcasts had a peak concurrency on YouTube of 2,25,000 viewers during Game 7.
“Game 7 was by far the highest peak concurrency for an Indian broadcast in chess,” Avadh Shah, India Director for chess.com, tells The Indian Express. “Overall, our joint broadcast for the 12 games of the 2024 World Chess Championship has crossed over 17 million views. In recent years we have broadcast live streams for all big-ticket chess events, like the FIDE Candidates and the Chess Olympiad. But viewership for this year’s event surpassed all of them easily.”
Shah adds that the live broadcast views are in addition to those for chess.com’s other video content (including YouTube Shorts, game highlights etc) for the World Chess Championship, that goes to over 60 million.
For the World Chess Championship, besides the joint broadcast with Chessbase India (mostly in English with a bit of Hindi), chess.com has tailor-made broadcasts in 11 languages: English, Arabic, Turkish, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, German, French, Indonesian, Italian and Spanish.
This is besides the live broadcast produced by FIDE itself for their YouTube page which has GM David Howell and IM Jovanka Houska with legends like Anand, Hou Yifan and Boris Gelfand as guests in the middle-game phase.
If there were not enough options for video recaps, there are also streamers like GM Anish Giri, IM Levy Rozman (GothamChess), GM Ben Finegold, GM Aman Hambleton (Chessbrah), GM Arturs Neiksans, FIDE Master Nemo Zhou, Epic Chess, and Chess Dojo.
All of these numbers could well shoot through the roof if Gukesh becomes the youngest-ever world champion later this week. It will be a coming-of-age moment for this golden generation of Indian chess players.
“But we are already experiencing the golden generation for chess viewership in India!” Shah notes.
The Indian revolution on the chessboard is not being televised like other sports. But it’s being live-streamed and dissected in great detail, each pawn push at a time.
