Castling. The Berlin defence. En passant. If you haven’t heard these terms, chances are you soon will. School chess clubs are booming, new apps are capturing a gen-Z audience and stone chess boards have been installed in parks across the country.
This year, a chess competition show comes to the BBC: Sue Perkins and The Traitors star Anthony Mathurin will present Chess Masters, in which 12 players battle it out.
Chess is already a big spectator sport on other platforms, such as Twitch. World No 1 Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian grandmaster, recently co-founded the chess-viewing platform Take Take Take, which aims to get casual players engaged in tournament broadcasts and is hugely popular with gen Z. Carlsen has 1.7 million followers on Instagram and his social media channels are making the game more accessible. There are now live streams on YouTube with expert commentators using the gap between moves to explain the process and options of the players.
“It’s remarkable,” said Malcolm Pein, chief executive of Chess in Schools and Communities, which aims to increase the number of children playing the game in state schools. “TV is a huge factor. In the way that darts and snooker were immensely popular but never that big until they were on the telly, the same is happening with chess.”
The 2020 Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, was widely credited with a boom in the game. Pein said: “People are starting to look at the game and all the interesting stories like cheating – which quite honestly is completely exaggerated – but it has given the game a colossal publicity boost.”
Chess is having a resurgence in schools – children are now playing “a hell of a lot more”, Pein said. “We now have over 3,000 projects UK-wide, and we get inundated with demand for chess-sets and lessons.”
Last September, the charity put a Facebook post on a headteachers’ forum and received 800 inquiries in a week. Shabnam Eslambolchi, a parent at Gospel Oak primary school, north London, introduced an extracurricular chess club in September. It filled up immediately. She said teaching chess was an affordable way to improve skills such as concentration, memory, problem-solving and patience: “The kids are so enthusiastic.”
Chess has long been male-dominated, but this is changing. The Queen’s Gambit protagonist was female, and there is a raft of female stars, such as nine-year-old Bodhana Sivanandan, England’s youngest international; India’s Tania Sachdev, who appeared in Vogue, and a cohort of female streamers including 22-year-old Anna Cramling of Sweden.
John Grasham, from the Midland Counties chess union, said tournaments are getting record attendance and the demographic was changing. “There used to be a lot of people of retirement age, and now there are a lot of young adults and women taking up the game.”
This, said Gilian Carpenter, who played for Lancashire and was Chorley champion in the late 80s, is a welcome change: “It used to be all grown men and me.You’d get an orange and soda from the smoky pub and then you’d go upstairs and play chess against these adults.”
The fashion world has embraced chess too. In 2022, a Louis Vuitton campaign featured footballers Ronaldo and Messi playing chess, while Fashion house Maison Margiela has created a board with pieces inspired by the brand’s Tabi shoe for the spring/summer 2025 New York fashion week.
An attractive board is a must-have for interior-design enthusiasts – but they aren’t cheap. A Prada leather one is £6,000, and a Hermès set in sapodilla wood and leather is £15,020.
But Carpenter said: “A chess board is a chess board. If anything, you don’t even need one, because a computer is so good.”
Pein added: “Chess is one of the world’s oldest games. It has got a sense of logic that has enabled it to remain the same. Computer games come and go, but chess has been around since the 8th century.”
