The Chess YouTube Revolution
Traditionally, in chess, there is information that is well known and widely accepted. An opening variation analyzed for centuries from World Championships to the instincts of the legends of the past to supercomputers grinding the position down. The top players in the world would play an opening, and the masses would follow. Kramnik, for instance, popularized the Berlin in his match against Kasparov, which then made it a popular opening from master games to casual club games. For centuries, this is how chess players' preferences have been determined. However, in this article, we will be looking at the shocking magnitude of the change in this system, and how big a difference a random video can make.
In this blog, I will extensively rely on the Lichess Openings feature, which is extremely helpful in my opinion. In case it is not clear, I say an opening is played .07 % of the time, or say it is at .07, that means that out of 10,000 games, it is played 7 times. I will not always refer to these numbers as percentages, so keep that in mind. We will look at 3 different ways the chess ecosystem has been influenced:
In recent years, from Lichess studies to YouTube shorts, opening traps have become a very popular aspect of chess. While it is painstakingly difficult to win a game by finding a plan, calculating, or grinding down endgames, it is much easier to try to win with quick traps and openings that might be objectively dubious but often trick the opponent. However, where do these tricks and traps come from? We will look at a few examples of content creators popularizing such openings.
