CHESS ONLINE'S CHESS : RICHNESS & MAGIC

PIA CRAMLING of Sweden was one of the first women crowned a chess grandmaster and she held the highest women's rating multiple times.

Decades later, she is recognized by chess fans across the world. But it is not often for her own landmark accomplishments. Instead, it's for making cameo appearances on the streaming platforms of her daughters, Anna Cramling, a popular chess influencer.

'' It's weird to think about the fact that she has this incredible history throughout her career, but now she's known from my channel,' Anna Cramling, 23, said, adding : ' She's a celebrity in ways that she wasn't before.

The younger Cramling, also an accomplished chess player, has more than 1.6 million subscribers on  YouTube.

Her rapid rise is part of the game's increasing popularity, a development that blends the legacy of a centuries-old pastime played by two people across a table from each other with modern technology that instantly connects millions across the globe.

But this shift has created a gulf between chess's traditional gatekeeper's and a younger generation growing the game.

And those conflicts have played out in public ways over the past year, most notably in the events leading up to the death four months ago of Daniel Naroditsky, a young star in the online chess world who had become a target of criticism from one of the game's most respected players, Vladimir Kramnik, a Russian grandmaster and former world champion. The aftershocks of Naroditsky's death are still being felt among fans.

The rapid change in chess can largely be attributed to a surge of interest during the pandemic in 2020,  when millions of housebound people found or rediscovered the game.

With the popularity of Netflix's '' The Queen's Gambit '' that same year, chess started to look very different, very quickly.

POPULAR social media chess personalities like Cramling, Alexandra and Andrea Botez and Levy Rozman now attract millions of eyeballs to their channels to a pursuit once viewed by many as inaccessible.

They specialize in distilling a complex historical game into quick, digestible shorts.

'' They're bringing the richness and magic and history of chess into the new world of understanding it and some of the meme culture, humor and context that goes into the chess community,'' said Allebest, the CEO of Chess.com.

'' It's fast, insightful and funny and it's made watching chess as a consumer so much more enjoyable.''

The World Students Society thanks Jonathan Abrams.