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Hansen and My Chess TV
March 16, 2018
Taken from I Want My Chess TV by Kevin Lincoln
https://www.topic.com/i-want-my-chesstv
When you think of chess, what do you picture in your head? Chances are it's either Bobby Fischer staring at a set of chess pieces like he wants to light them on fire, or it's two kids in glasses sitting at one of those tables with the built-in gameboards, playing after school while they wait for their parents to pick them up.
Compare that to a typical session with the Chessbrahs, the most popular chess streamers on Twitch. Over the course of one of their streams, which can last up to four hours, you might see chairs thrown amid a torrent of f-bombs, freestyle rapping mid-game, and a never-ending barrage of trash talk. This is the new, online era of chess-set to the soundtrack of dance music.
Twitch, for the unfamiliar, is a website where people watch other people play video games. If that sounds insane to you, then you probably aren't one of the 150 million users and 1.5 million broadcasters who visit every month, nor are you likely part of the reason it sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars in 2014. "eSports" - competitive, livestreamed video gaming - has grown into a $1.5 billion industry that's expected to reach $2.3 billion in just five years.
While video games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike are what Twitch is best known for, chess, when played online, also qualifies as an eSport, and there's a significant and growing community of chess players on the site. Of all the chess players regularly streaming on Twitch, among the most popular are world top 10 and multiple-time US champion Hikaru Nakamura and the Chessbrahs, founded and anchored by 25-year-old Canadian grandmaster Eric Hansen.
During the early 2000s, Hansen was a misbehaving kid with an ADHD diagnosis growing up in Calgary. He began playing chess after school as a way to keep his mind occupied. By the time he was a teenager, he'd gotten serious about the game. He earned his grandmaster title - the highest honor available to a chess player, given by the world organizing body FIDE - at the age of 20, after spending a year playing for the University of Texas at Dallas on a chess scholarship, and then moving to Europe to play professionally.
During Hansen's stint in college, he also became one of the first people to livestream himself playing chess. He started streaming purely for fun, sometimes for as many as 10 hours a day on the old Livestream platform, even when only 2 or 3 people were watching. In 2014, after a few years playing in Europe, he returned to Canada. There, burnt out from traveling and hustling on the pro circuit and inspired by the rise of eSports - Hansen was also a serious Counter-Strike player in high school - he decided to see if there might also be an audience for live chess online.
Hansen would sometimes stream for 60 or 70 hours a week, attracting just 10 or 20 viewers. But as he grew his channel, which he called Chessbrah, Hansen drew inspiration from public fitness gurus who invited fans and followers on social media into their lives and their habits.
From the start, the brashness of Chessbrah belied the stereotypes that tend to plague chess: that it's stodgy, quiet, the domain of old Russians and lonely kids. Hansen and his chess-player friends were into dance music and partying, and they'd get together to drink beer, goof around, and go to raves. They were typical twentysomething Canadians in every way - except that their parties often involved high-speed chess. Rather than conform to notions of what the chess world was like, they decided to make it their own.
"We always thought the stereotypes were something we could change and that didn't even apply to us, and it wasn't necessarily fair for the whole game itself," Hansen says. "One of the reasons why I did Chessbrah, and why it's called Chessbrah, is that a lot of people don't do chess or try chess because they're afraid of what their friends will think.. But the game itself is really fun, and I'm sure a lot more people could like it than the current numbers indicate."
(Hansen) is currently the 152nd-ranked player in the world, and the Chessbrah channel is filled with other grandmasters, including universally respected GM Yasser Seirawan, whose regular presence adds some gravitas.
"It was a really hated stream for the first year or so. I didn't mind because - and again, this is more part of the North American culture -but if you don't have haters you're not being yourself and expressing your opinions," Hansen says. "It's something that I have no issue with, taking criticism and negative feedback. People will really insult you, but we're not a PC stream. We're just all over the place, and we knew that would generate controversy and that chess was very conservative. But the whole point was to disrupt some of the traditional chess ideas."
March 16, 2018
Taken from I Want My Chess TV by Kevin Lincoln
https://www.topic.com/i-want-my-chesstv
When you think of chess, what do you picture in your head? Chances are it's either Bobby Fischer staring at a set of chess pieces like he wants to light them on fire, or it's two kids in glasses sitting at one of those tables with the built-in gameboards, playing after school while they wait for their parents to pick them up.
Compare that to a typical session with the Chessbrahs, the most popular chess streamers on Twitch. Over the course of one of their streams, which can last up to four hours, you might see chairs thrown amid a torrent of f-bombs, freestyle rapping mid-game, and a never-ending barrage of trash talk. This is the new, online era of chess-set to the soundtrack of dance music.
Twitch, for the unfamiliar, is a website where people watch other people play video games. If that sounds insane to you, then you probably aren't one of the 150 million users and 1.5 million broadcasters who visit every month, nor are you likely part of the reason it sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars in 2014. "eSports" - competitive, livestreamed video gaming - has grown into a $1.5 billion industry that's expected to reach $2.3 billion in just five years.
While video games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike are what Twitch is best known for, chess, when played online, also qualifies as an eSport, and there's a significant and growing community of chess players on the site. Of all the chess players regularly streaming on Twitch, among the most popular are world top 10 and multiple-time US champion Hikaru Nakamura and the Chessbrahs, founded and anchored by 25-year-old Canadian grandmaster Eric Hansen.
During the early 2000s, Hansen was a misbehaving kid with an ADHD diagnosis growing up in Calgary. He began playing chess after school as a way to keep his mind occupied. By the time he was a teenager, he'd gotten serious about the game. He earned his grandmaster title - the highest honor available to a chess player, given by the world organizing body FIDE - at the age of 20, after spending a year playing for the University of Texas at Dallas on a chess scholarship, and then moving to Europe to play professionally.
During Hansen's stint in college, he also became one of the first people to livestream himself playing chess. He started streaming purely for fun, sometimes for as many as 10 hours a day on the old Livestream platform, even when only 2 or 3 people were watching. In 2014, after a few years playing in Europe, he returned to Canada. There, burnt out from traveling and hustling on the pro circuit and inspired by the rise of eSports - Hansen was also a serious Counter-Strike player in high school - he decided to see if there might also be an audience for live chess online.
Hansen would sometimes stream for 60 or 70 hours a week, attracting just 10 or 20 viewers. But as he grew his channel, which he called Chessbrah, Hansen drew inspiration from public fitness gurus who invited fans and followers on social media into their lives and their habits.
From the start, the brashness of Chessbrah belied the stereotypes that tend to plague chess: that it's stodgy, quiet, the domain of old Russians and lonely kids. Hansen and his chess-player friends were into dance music and partying, and they'd get together to drink beer, goof around, and go to raves. They were typical twentysomething Canadians in every way - except that their parties often involved high-speed chess. Rather than conform to notions of what the chess world was like, they decided to make it their own.
"We always thought the stereotypes were something we could change and that didn't even apply to us, and it wasn't necessarily fair for the whole game itself," Hansen says. "One of the reasons why I did Chessbrah, and why it's called Chessbrah, is that a lot of people don't do chess or try chess because they're afraid of what their friends will think.. But the game itself is really fun, and I'm sure a lot more people could like it than the current numbers indicate."
(Hansen) is currently the 152nd-ranked player in the world, and the Chessbrah channel is filled with other grandmasters, including universally respected GM Yasser Seirawan, whose regular presence adds some gravitas.
"It was a really hated stream for the first year or so. I didn't mind because - and again, this is more part of the North American culture -but if you don't have haters you're not being yourself and expressing your opinions," Hansen says. "It's something that I have no issue with, taking criticism and negative feedback. People will really insult you, but we're not a PC stream. We're just all over the place, and we knew that would generate controversy and that chess was very conservative. But the whole point was to disrupt some of the traditional chess ideas."
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