Current chess at a glance
Nobody's a stranger to chess these days. Online communities are thriving more than ever before, and there's an increase in interest in Chess - at least, on Twitch.
What happened on Twitch? GM Hikaru Nakamura happened. In my opinion, he's the one who's contributed the most amount of attention to the game recently, along with WFM Alexandria Botez and to a certain extent - xQcOW.
It was the perfect storm - GMHikaru has been playing chess on and off on Twitch since last year, but his explosion in viewership came in mid-March, when Felix (xQcOW) - a famous Overwatch player and variety streamer on Twitch - began playing chess as well. Hikaru and Felix began talking to each other on stream and their fanbase collided, leading to a snowball effect on Twitch where other big streamers started to play chess as well.
As someone who used to enjoy playing chess with his dad casually and had fond memories of the game, I'm amazed to see it thrive thanks to this relationship. It's a win-win: Hikaru brings new players to chess, Felix gets new viewers from chess.
I want to play chess! Where do I start?
There's an abundant amount of resources out there for people looking to start their journey into chess. I will list them out below.
Books
- Ray Cheng - Practical Chess Exercises 600 Lessons from Tactics to Strategy
- Irving Chernev - Logical Chess Move By Move
- Yasser Seirawan, Jeremy Silman - Play Winning Chess
Puzzles
- https://blitztactics.com/ - Rote memorization
- https://lichess.org/training/ - Can be rated
- https://www.chess.com/puzzles - Can be rated, money-walled