Aaron Alford is a veteran esports and technology writer with eight years of experience in the games industry. He has contributed to a wide variety of publications including Inven Global, Hotspawn, Dot Esports, The Escapist, and Upcomer. By night, he's a Hades 2 speedrunner.
Olivia Richman is a seasoned esports journalist who has worked with Inven Global, Esports Illustrated, Esports.gg, and more. As an editor and writer at Esports Insider, she loves telling unique esports stories, especially within the FGC. When not working and gaming, Olivia loves collecting Kirby plush, eating sushi, and driving her cars at the track.
Image credit: Sarah Bolt, Esports World Cup Foundation via Flickr The chess category at the Esports World Cup has a $1.5 million USD prize pool.
That is almost on par with the Grand Chess Tour ’s prize pool of $2,000,000 USD, which is dispersed over the course of six tournaments. The EWC is giving it away in one.
That places the EWC among the world’s best-funded individual chess tournaments, despite being ostensibly an esports tournament. The likes of Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura , and Alireza Firouzja are rubbing shoulders with esports legends like Faker and Niko in what appears to an outsider to be a baffling crossover episode.
The tournament has drawn a decent bit of conversation around whether chess truly belongs at the EWC. I’m here to set the record straight: Chess in its online form is absolutely an esport, but it’s quite silly to force the esports version of the game when players are flying all around the world to compete on the same stage.
In 2020, TSM did something huge: they signed chess professional Hikaru Nakamura to their esports organization. Hikaru is, of course, a Chess Grandmaster and one of the greatest living chess players in the world.
He is also the pioneer of the online chess streaming community alongside figures like Levy “GothamChess” Rozman, Nemo Zhou (who beat Hikaru to the punch by signing with CLG a week before he signed with TSM), and the Botez Sisters, who signed with Envy around the same time as well.
A chess prodigy at 15 years old, now a 5-time U.S. champion and highest-rated blitz player in the world. Welcome to TSM, @GMHikaru 🤝 📺: https://t.co/6iVNHawicZ pic.twitter.com/fpDzuc6Fqw
TSM’s announcement was more than just another roster move; it was the proverbial starting pistol for chess’s new identity: Chess, the esport.
Six years later, the question of whether or not online chess is an esport isn’t particularly contentious among fans of chess or esports. Both groups generally agree that online chess — especially featuring stricter time controls under 10 minutes — is without a doubt an esport.
The premoves, automatic move detection, and 2D visualization in lieu of 3D have all converged to create something unique, distinct from over the board chess. Aside from an occasional detractor or old-head who doesn’t really like the idea that chess could be a video game, it’s an issue we as chess players and fans have settled and buried at this point.
But I have a different issue with the way the EWC does chess.
Doesn’t it seem a little bit silly that EWC players travel from all around the world to be in the same place as each other, with the ability to play chess in real life, but instead the match is two world-class chess players in esports uniforms staring at their respective monitors?
While I understand that the point of the EWC is to show off the esport of chess, the…