Grand Chess Tour 2022, one of the largest chess events of the year, has recently come to an end. It was organized by the St. Louis Chess Club, and the main sponsor of the series was the Romanian nonprofit company Superbet Foundation. The event had a $1.4 million prize pool, broken down into five tournaments, two of which were classical chess, and three were rapid and blitz chess. The final championships were also held in cooperation with the FIDE and Chess.com organizations.
2022 St. Louis Rapid & Blitz and the following 2022 Sinquefield Cup were the culmination of Grand Chess Tour 2022. The winner of these tournaments was the grandmaster Alireza Firouzja from Iran, representing France. The 19-year-old chess player also won the 2022 Grand Chess Tour Champion title, based on the points he earned during the season.
We should also say that two jokers took part in 2022 Sinquefield Cup along with the top 6 players of the Tour: the World Champion Magnus Carlsen and the American grandmaster Hans Niemann. This tournament attracted a lot of media attention as Carlsen withdrew from the competition after losing to Niemann in the 3rd round.
Sinquefield Cup, which determined the Grand Chess Tour 2022 champion, was the most popular tournament in the series. Its broadcasts totalled more than 1.1 million Hours Watched and drew almost 22.6K Average Viewers. The event's Peak Viewers number was 48.7K people. The channel of grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura became the most popular among those covering Sinquefield Cup both by Hours Watched and Peak Viewers. The St. Louis Chess Club channel ranks second by both of the metrics, while blitzstream and Chess24.com round out the top three by Peak Viewers and Hours Watched, respectively.
Most popular Grand Chess Tour 2022 tournaments
2022 St. Louis Rapid & Blitz, held a couple of days earlier, ranks second among the tournaments in the series. At the same time, it is 11% behind the leader by PV number and only 1.5% by AV number. It should be noted that the metrics of the first three Grand Chess Tour 2022 championships were almost twice lower than those of the final events. At the same time, in the overall chess tournament standings for 2022, at the time of publication, Sinquefield Cup is in 12th place, and Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz is in 14th place.
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As you can see, the younger generation of chess players is winning over the veterans of the game more and more often. We should remind you that despite Magnus Carlsen becoming the champion of FTX Crypto Cup 2022 in August, he was defeated in one of the crucial matches by the 17-year-old Indian talented chess player Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. More details about the results of the event are available in our article.
