Chess as an esport? Really? Have you seen what happened to esports in the past decade, both in terms of business propositions and morals? That was my first thought when the inquiry from the TakeTakeTake folks landed in our inbox, ready to discuss the huge shifts in the royal game and where they see their place in it.
A bold business gamble
Having started out as a fantasy chess project, TakeTakeTake and its app have brought on board many of the biggest names in chess with the goal of revitalizing the way the game is followed by fans, bringing the sort of heavyweight funding ($3 million raised in its pre-seed funding round) and business acumen to competitive games that we’ve last seen in the heyday of the Overwatch League.
While chess folks will see Magnus Carlsen as the figurehead behind the operation, those reading the business papers will be more interested in the presence of Mats André Kristiansen, the CEO. For the brains behind Oda, an online grocery store that has become Norway’s only unicorn—the moniker given to startups that reach a billion-dollar valuation—it was a chance encounter with the former world champion that saw him get on board with his then-nascent fantasy chess project, which then expanded into the TakeTakeTake app and a large selection of ideas about the future of chess as a whole.
As a longtime chess fan and someone who’s seen the rise and burn of esports from the sidelines, I found the notion of seeing Carlsen as a so-called “esports ambassador,” watching Nakamura and Firouzja don a Falcons jersey, and that chess can become a “dynamic spectator sport” worth interrogating in full. Hence, a conversation with Mats, wondering how much his vision of the chess future overlaps with esports’ problematic past.
It turns out Kristiansen has insight into both. Like so many other Norwegians, he got interested in chess after seeing the wall-to-wall coverage of Carlsen’s exploits in newspapers and on television, becoming an amateur player in the process. But he’s also grown up playing classics like Counter-Strike, Warcraft 3, StarCraft, Age of Empires, and he’s still in the throes of WoW. “I think I’m the only parent at my daughter’s school who knows what League of Legends really is and how to play it,” he adds, smiling.
Chess as an esport? A definite maybe
Strategy games, then. We’re long past the heyday of RTS games, both in terms of popularity and esports presence, and you have to scroll quite far down on the viewership charts and the prize money lists to find games that focus on one-versus-one battles rather than teams and their exploits.
But in Kristiansen’s eyes, the idea of chess as an esport is a new one. The old days with men in suits playing classical doesn’t count in this regard. “After the surge of chess.com and playing chess on the internet has become more and more popular, the best players don’t only meet each other on physical boards now,” he says. The games have become faster, clock management and mouse skills have come into play, and the random starting positions of Freestyle Chess—or Fischer Random, if you’re old-school—harken back to map vetoes in his eyes. Accessible, quick matches, not to mention the massive number of people who know what chess is and how to play it all around the world, from preschoolers to 90-year-olds? No video game can quite compete with that.
That said, there is a clear element of preaching to the choir here. Read through the company’s news hits in traditional platforms—be it in Forbes or Norwegian media—and esports never really factors into the conversation. Rather, it’s traditional sports that the parallels are made to, like in a late October interview with sports site Dagbladet last year, when Kristiansen said, “The ambition and it is not just mine, is to make chess a TV sport, not only for viewers but also for spectators.” And indeed, even in our chat, we steer in this direction, with him saying, “I don’t really care if it’s an esport or a sport, we want it to be recognized by a big audience and get more sponsorships. And I think one of the things that chess needs to get there might be teams.”
Later, we circle back to this idea—the Olympiad, the Team Chess League, how Carlsen himself savors these competitions, and the obvious storyline potentials of camaraderie and rivalries. “It brings you more stars and more people you can relate to.”
Viewing chess from a new angle
Not just teams are needed, but a better spectator experience, too—something Nakamura also called one of the biggest issues with chess broadcasts in our conversation a few years ago. “There are basic rules of chess that everyone understands,” Kristiansen says, moving the conversation beyond the controversial evaluation bar. You want to capture pieces, promote your pawns, attack the king, with visualization options for each—think weak pawns, weak squares, distance to promotion. Perfectly valid options for a less experienced audience.
The bigger part is the commentary. Kristiansen is dismissive of the traditional approach, saying, “they’re basically explaining chess from a grandmaster to a grandmaster,” suggesting an example where they wouldn’t discuss a player possibly winning a piece because they know the opponent won’t blunder the relevant move. “You can make it more exciting by saying, ‘will Magnus hang his queen now?’ because if this was a beginner that played this game, they would have been likely to do so.”
While Kristiansen’s example does conjure the image of a Formula 1 commentator screaming that Max Verstappen might randomly crash out in an empty corner at any time, the importance of a lay audience is undeniable. So is the notion that you cannot keep it all buttoned-up for a six-hour marathon broadcast: He points to the Tour de France, its studio segments, the statistics and the history they can call back to, and the obvious parallels this has to chess.
He also cites the Norwegian national television’s chess viewership statistics with a layperson-focused approach, which were indeed impressive considering the size of the potential audience: for example, an average of almost 300,000 viewers were watching the 2021 World Rapid Chess Championship in a nation of 5.4 million.
Impressive indeed. The catch? NRK dropped their classical world championship coverage after Carlsen stopped being involved, saying, “without Magnus, it doesn’t have interest for the viewers.” While that wasn’t the end of their involvement with the royal game, it is telling NRK’s sports section at the time of writing features a mere eleven chess articles since the turn of the year. While almost all of them focus on Carlsen, alert readers will also find TakeTakeTake-affiliated content in there as well.
The TakeTakeTake promise
On to the app and the content strategy, then. Kristiansen does try to cast a wide net. In terms of audience segmentation, he says, “a prerequisite to following chess is to have played a little bit yourself,” saying that a large percentage of their users do so but haven’t actively followed the competitive scene before. He sees this as a marked difference from most sports, where there are more spectators than active players in the world. The vision, of course, is to increase these numbers even further.
Checking out the TakeTakeTake app, there are some genuinely good ideas for engagement. A frictionless experience with sleek visuals and professional portraits, highlighting the sort of play-by-play live commentary liveblog you tend to see in publications like The Guardian for the game’s biggest events, but for a wider range of competitions and aimed at a more everyday audience. It’s a genuinely nice way to follow the ebb and flow of a classical game, though I do wish they didn’t treat straightforward moves as brilliancies, though.
Audience members can also enjoy an interactive “guess the move” element where they have a handful of strong Stockfish suggestions and an “other” option to select when trying to predict what move the grandmaster will ultimately play. My personal favorites, however, are the short after-action writeups—even if they are sporadic and widely varying in quality at this point—and the awards for the Most Valuable Piece and the Piece of Sh*t (their censorship, not mine) on the board. There are also player profiles and ways to follow your individual favorites, no doubt remnants of the app’s original fantasy chess concept, and still in dire need of fleshing out.
All this is in service of building up a massive user base, hopefully in the millions. Kristiansen echoed similar sentiments in an interview with ChessBase India, where he floated the possibility of advertisements and a subscription-based premium service as well for monetization avenues. The past decade has clearly shown that getting the esports audience to pay for something is like teaching a tree fly, and whether the app in its mature form will provide a good enough value proposition for fans is impossible to say at this point.
Certain avenues for this are off-bounds, legally speaking: the moves themselves, of course, cannot be paywalled—ridiculous as this may sound, there has been an attempt to do just that in 2016 by AGON, the company that organized that year’s Candidates Tournament, an ill-conceived idea with clear legal precedent going against it in the form of NBA v. Motorola, a case from 1997.
Of course, not all of TakeTakeTake’s content lives on its app. The project launched with much fanfare and the involvement of heavyweights like GothamChess and Nakamura, providing their own brand of commentary and interviews for some of last year’s big events on their YouTube and Twitch channels.
This wasn’t without controversy. At the World Rapid and Blitz Championship, GothamChess interviewed Daniel Naroditsky, an online blitz specialist grandmaster and popular content creator who’s been the target of Vladimir Kramnik’s cheating accusations for a while. The social media post for the interview went out with the quote “Kramnik is worse than DIRT,” with Naroditsky responding, “this isn’t what I said, nor what I meant […] please take this down rather than misquoting what I said in the heat of the moment.” Both interviewer and interviewee did cleanup duty in a Reddit thread that saw over 6,400 upvotes, with Gotham agreeing that it was a “totally wrong headline.”
This in itself wouldn’t warrant much discussion—errors and editorial misjudgments happen. The follow-up, or lack thereof, made for odd viewing, however. While the team did wrap up the live broadcast of the tournament, no edited videos went out after the coverage of the Carlsen-Niemann quarterfinal match, including the controversial conclusion of the tournament that saw the Norwegian phenom split the title with Ian Nepomniachtchi after a set of draws. The channel then went dark for over a month, returning on Feb. 4 for their first video of the year, an interview with FIDE CEO Emil Sutovsky and the Freestyle Chess controversy that was brewing at the time.
From Kristiansen’s perspective, the goal was to get the basic product out for the classical world championship match that started on Nov. 26 and get as much feedback as possible through the busy period that followed. They consciously took January off since Tata Steel is the only big event of the month. “You will see much more content from us going forward,” he confirmed, saying that producing a broadcast is an all-hands-on-deck affair for their small team, with a press release confirming that they have 11 dedicated staff members to move around on the board. Still, it is less small now than it was at the time of our discussion: Since then, David Howell has officially joined the team as a host and chess expert.
Playing the long game
Shifting back to the esports angle, the influence of the Esports World Cup remains the elephant in the room. Apart from Nakamura’s stint on Misfits in 2022—which in itself was more of a content creation gig than anything else—no high-profile grandmaster has signed with an org before the royal game was added to the schedule of the Saudi super-event, and while the extra source of income makes this a no-brainer for the players, Kristiansen insists there’s real synergy at play. “Chess has been around for 1,500 years. Everyone knows who Magnus Carlsen is. It’s a sort of quality stamp on esports.” Not just a quick and easy way to get a slightly larger slice of the Saudi pie, then.
“The question is, are the organizational owners of chess ready for this? Are they going to take full ownership and make the most of this situation that you have the esports world’s eyes on you?” His questions, not mine.
When presented with the bear case—that the Esports World Cup’s relevance may not last forever, that fans of competitive gaming tend to follow players rather than teams, and that, really, we have been here before—Kristiansen is unperturbed. “Chess has a very decentralized tournament calendar. It really needs a Premier League or a Champions League that kind of combines all of this together and makes it more accessible for fans,” he says, adding that their team actually views the FIDE Candidates cycle as one of the most interesting tournament products out there, wishing that there would be more of those like it going around. Actual team battles, both online and over the board, repeatedly and consistently, could solve many of these issues in his eyes.
For the first time since Kasparov’s acrimonious split from FIDE in 1993, the future of elite-level chess is unclear again, looking much like a chaotic middlegame on the board. TakeTakeTake’s vision might be one of the viable candidate moves, but there’s still a lot of calculation left to be done.
