28 September 26
Uzbekistan For The Win
For some reason a couple weeks ago I ended up going down the rabbithole of chess YouTube videos. I was unaware this was a lively genre, but it turns out chess really boomed as an online activity when the pandemic hit in 2020, and chess streamers followed suit. And not just run-of-the-mill geeky enthusiasts —- in fact the number two chess player in the world, Hikaru Nakamura, has a YouTube channel with 3.24 million subscribers. At that level of popularity Hikaru is deriving more income from his streaming career than from playing tournament chess, and streaming seems to be taking priority for him. The number one player in the world is indisputably Magnus Carlsen who doesn’t himself do much streaming but is very much present on other people’s channels.
I don’t follow much of the high-level commentary but it is interesting to hear from and about the cast of characters that inhabit chess at its top level, as well as learning about the biggest tournaments. Uzbekistan seems to be having their time in the sun. They just hosted and won the gold medal in the 46th Chess Olympiad, which was held over the past couple of weeks in Samarkand. There were teams from 204 nations in this tournament.
An Uzbek grandmaster, Javohkhir Sindarov, is also likely to become the next world chess champion. But what about Magnus Carlsen? He was five-time world champion starting in 2013, but he decided not to defend his title for 2023, preferring to focus on other forms of chess than classical (i.e. fast chess and freestyle chess). In 2023 the Chinese grandmaster Ding Liren won the championship, but he was defeated in late 2024 by the Indian grandmaster Gukesh Dommaraju, him becoming the youngest world champion ever at age 18. The 2026 World Chess Championship is coming up at the end of November and the beginning of December, and Javhokhir is the challenger. Gukesh’s form has fallen off over the past year or so and most commentators are giving the advantage to Javohkhir in the upcoming championship tournament.
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