Four chess events of relatively similar significance were live-streamed on Twitch and YouTube in March. The most popular among them was Team Chess Battle 2024 hosted by Chess.com, which gathered over 47.1K Peak Viewers.
The standout feature of the Team Chess Battle 2024 was its format: instead of the traditional individual tournament, grandmasters and professional players competed in pairs. Each pair of players could freely communicate with each other during the match, discussing strategies and so on. The total prize pool for the Team Chess Battle 2024 was $25.000, and among its participants was renowned grandmaster and popular streamer Hikaru Nakamura; he played in a pair with American chess player Levy Rozman, the host of the GothamChess channel.
It was thanks to the duo of Hikaru Nakamura and Levy Rozman that the tournament managed to attract so many viewers. When the duo played their matches (and streamed them), the peak viewership of the tournament reached 43-47K viewers. Nakamura and Rozman were defeated in the semifinals: as a result, only 19K viewers tuned in to the tournament's streams for the grand final.
The Reykjavik Open 2024 gathered around 44.3K PV. This event took place in March in Iceland, featuring the likes of Botez sisters, Anna Cramling, and Dina Belenkaya. They all covered the event, with the Botez sisters attracting the most viewers. The total prize pool for the Reykjavik Open 2024 was just over €17.000, and the 22-year-old Romanian grandmaster Bogdan-Daniel Deac emerged as the winner.
Other events on the list are Prague International Chess Festival 2024 and the Collegiate Chess League Spring 2024, which gathered 27K and 5.7K PV, respectively. The event in Prague attracted such an audience thanks to a community casting by the Botez sisters and Dina Belenkaya. As for the Collegiate Chess League Spring, only Anna Cramling covered it among the streamers.
