How About A Nice Game of Chess?

I recently wrote at PJ Media about how chess went from being the hobby nobody wanted to admit to loving to the thing everyone suddenly wants a piece of. Before you picture me holding court at some underground chess club, looking effortlessly smooth, let me stop you. I’m not that cool. I’m just a chess novice who started playing regularly about six months ago, but I’m having fun.

I never played as a kid. Chess had a nerdy reputation back then, the kind of thing that got you shoved into a locker, not invited to a party. So when I picked it back up as an adult, I bought a smart chessboard to speed up my learning curve.

Turns out I’m part of a much bigger story. There’s been a chess boom in recent years, due in part to the pandemic, pop culture and a wave of content creators for turning a centuries-old board game into a full-blown phenomenon among Generation Z. Levy Rozman, the 30-year-old chess master and educator known online as GothamChess, told Axios just how different things look now compared to when he was growing up.

“It was not the coolest thing in the world to be a chess player,” Rozman told Axios.

Rozman also pointed that the kids who approach him now because they genuinely love the game look like the exact type who would have bullied him for playing it back in school. That’s how far the social status of chess has flipped.

Chess.com had 6.4 million active U.S. players as of June 1, 2026, up from 4 million on that same date the year before, according to figures the company shared with Axios. I joined Chess.com last year myself, and recently started meeting a friend at Starbucks to play in person every week.

Eventbrite told Axios that chess-related events on its platform grew nearly 10% nationally from 2024 to 2025, right alongside a broader pattern of chess grandmasters getting younger every year. Axios traces the whole surge back to 2020, when pandemic lockdowns pushed millions of bored, locked-down people to rediscover the game online, a trend Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit poured gasoline on.

The animation below shows a recent game I won (playing white) against a friend. I was especially proud of this one — I don’t think he saw checkmate coming at all.

Of course, I’ve lost plenty of games. And frankly, that’s never bothered me because I learn a lot more from my losses than my wins. I make a lot of mistakes, some set me back, others cost me a game. I definitely remember the lessons of the lost games quicker.

It’s kind of funny how I got swept up in a larger chess wave without even knowing it. My desire to learn prompted me to back a Kickstarter campaign for a smart chessboard with self-moving pieces called GoChess.

When the company released a Harry Potter-branded version without the moving pieces last year, I bought that one first, because, damn, it looks cool.

Honestly, most of the time, I’m playing chess on a screen because it’s easy to do so. But, personally, I prefer playing on a board, which is why I got the smart board. I saw it as a tool for learning away from the screen. And, playing both ways I’ve learned that playing chess on your phone is a lot different from playing on a board.

Rozman says chess exposes personal weaknesses fast: impatience, excessive aggression, ego, poor stress regulation. The game forces you to fix them or keep losing. I’ll vouch for that. Chess is genuinely good brain exercise. It’s also addictive.

What I’ve come to love most about chess is the logic of the game. Every piece has its rules. A bishop stays on its color forever. A knight moves in that stubborn L-shape. No amount of wishing changes that. I still don’t quite get the en passant rule, but still, in the end, chess is a structure, pure and rigid game. And yet, when you stack the rigid rules together and you get something with infinite possibilities.

If you’re on chess.com, feel free to reach out and we can play a game.