Probably no one would argue that Magnus Carlsen is the greatest chess player of the last decade. The Norwegian won the fifth (!) World title last Friday, defeating the Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi in eleven games. The Dubai competition was broadcast around the world and became the most watched one on streaming platforms in the entire history of the game. Esports Charts sums up the results of the FIDE World Championship 2021.
New Chess Record
It seems that the World Championship was followed even by those who have always been far from chess. The record for viewers on streaming platforms was broken on the second day of the tournament, and subsequently the result was improved several times.
FIDE World Championship 2021 reached 613.4K Peak Viewers! That many spectators followed the sixth game in the series, which was won by Carlsen. Interestingly, this game became the longest in the history of World chess championships, as it consisted of 136 plays and lasted 7 hours and 45 minutes.
In total, viewers of the World Championship spent more than 12.6M hours on broadcasts, which is twice as much as at the World Championship 2018. The average audience of the World Championship 2021 was 239.7K viewers, which is almost 2.5 times more than at the previous iteration of the tournament.
There was incredible hype around the FIDE World Championship 2021. The event is by far the most watched one on streaming platforms in chess history. Previously, professional competitions gathered less than 300K spectators at the peak of the broadcast.
Note that the World Championship gathered more viewers among all the other chess competitions, including amateur ones with the most popular Twitch & YouTube content creators, who regularly attract thousands of viewers. Previous record belonged to Chess.com Pogchamps 3 (xQc, Rubius, Ludwig, Tubbo, pokimane were among the participants) as it was watched by up to 375.1K Peak Viewers.
The two largest chess companies in the world Chess.com and chess24 have made a huge contribution to the high viewership numbers. They organized several dozen broadcasts on different platforms and languages and gathered the majority of viewers.
The highest numbers were reached by Chess.com's main English-speaking Twitch channel. It had 140K Peak Viewers, and an average audience of 44.6K people:
“The World Championship is consistently the most important event on the global chess calendar, and Chess.com’s record-setting viewership on Twitch is a reflection of that importance as well as our best-in-class content production. We continue to set the standard for chess content creation across platforms, and expect to reach new heights in 2022 and beyond.”
Austin Gasparini, Director of Business Development at Chess.com
Chess24 has become a leader on YouTube. Its main English-speaking channel reached 88.1K Peak Viewers with an average audience of 40.8K people. In addition, this channel became the leader by total number of views among all channels of the tournament:
“We are proud that chess24 was one of the largest contributors to the record-setting figures as the leader on YouTube, the streaming platform of choice for most viewers. These viewership numbers have reaffirmed our belief that chess did not experience a one-off boom in the last years, but rather an overall increase in interest that will see chess popularity continue to rise over the coming years.”
Arkus Fredriksson, COO of chess24 and CSO of Play Magnus Group
All Hail Carlsen!
Carlsen's victory over Nepomniachtchi became the largest one at the world championships in the last 28 years. Norwegian didn’t lose a single game in eleven matches: he won four and seven more games were drawn. Thus, Carlsen won the World Championship for the fifth time in a row: earlier he defeated Viswanathan Anand twice, as well as Sergey Karjakin and Fabiano Caruana in the matches for the chess crown.
The Norwegian player secured the first place in the FIDE world ranking with 2856 points. Note that he also holds the current record for maximum points earned: Carlsen's rating in May 2014 was 2882 points, thus he improved Garry Kasparov's achievement (2851) set in the summer of 1999.
Carlsen's greatness is also confirmed by his achievements in "fast” chess. The Norwegian is also the reigning world blitz and rapid champion; he will have to defend his titles at the championship that will be hosted by Warsaw at the end of December.
***
Detailed data on FIDE World Championship 2021 (including stats by platforms and languages) is available to our PRO subscribers. Need even more statistics? Then you will be interested in the dashboard: access to it can be purchased directly from our sales department.
