The Champions Chess Tour 2021 tournament series ended in early October. The total prize money pool of the series was $1.5 million. The best chess players in the world, including current world champion Magnus Carlsen, competed in the tournaments. In a new article Esports Charts sums up the results of the chess competitions, which were held by chess24.com and the Play Magnus company.
Champions Chess Tour 2021: tournaments, participants and viewership statistics
There were 10 tournaments in total, where Magnus Carlsen scored the highest number of points. He won four tournaments, including Meltwater Champions Chess Tour Finals.
Final event of the series was on air for over 46 hours and for that time it collected over 1.6M Hours Watched. One average, 35.5K viewers tuned in to watch the games of the decisive tournaments, and Peak Viewers number reached 75K viewers.
One of the participants in Meltwater Champions Chess Tour Finals was Hikaru Nakamura, a grandmaster and a popular streamer of the TSM club. He finished sixth in the final tournament. Nakamura streamed on his Twitch channel and had almost 299K Hours Watched, placing second among most watched broadcasts, only behind chess24 with 400K Hours Watched on Youtube. Third place also went to chess24, but to its Twitch broadcast — 234K Hours Watched.
Hikaru's stream had 12,6K Peak Viewers, ranking Hikaru's channel third in this metric. The first and second places were taken by chess24 with its broadcasts on Twitch and Youtube — 20K and 15K Peak Viewers, respectively.
The Skilling Open, the first tournament in the series, ranked third in terms of Hours Watched with 3.4 million. The American chess player Wesley So and Magnus Carlsen had a match in the final of the tournament, the Peak Viewers of which was 188K spectators. Wesley So became the winner of the Champions Chess Tour 2021 opening tournament.
Magnus Carlsen Invitational ranked second by Hours Watched. The tournament accumulated 4.7 million Hours Watched and 179K Peak Viewers.
The most popular tournament in the series was Opera Euro Rapid. It had 5.3 million Hours Watched, and the Peak Viewers number (283K) was reached in the decisive match: yet again between Wesley So and Magnus Carlsen. The winner of the Opera Euro Rapid was the American who beat Magnus for the second time. The Average Viewers number at the tournament was 126K.
The least popular tournament of the series by key metrics was Chessable Masters 2021. Hours Watched of the tournament totaled 923K. Peak Viewers number reached 44K spectators, and the tournament's Average Viewers number was 21K people. It should be noted, that from late spring 2021 the audience of the tournaments began to slightly decrease, which can be explained with season changes: summer is usually a vacation time, people spend less time watching streams.
All in all, the viewership statistics of Champions Chess Tour 2021 demonstrate that the chess game audience shows great interest in such events. Over the past couple of years, chess has strengthened its position in the streaming industry, and esports organizations have begun to actively hire famous chess players as their content creators. In addition, the growth of chess' popularity has likely been influenced by self-isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Netflix's acclaimed series "The Queen's Gambit".
Also read: Is online chess an esports?
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