The Online Chess Revolution: How the Internet Transformed the Game — and Made BigChess Possible

Published at bigchessgame.com — by the BigChess editorial team

In 1990, if you wanted to play a game of chess against a stranger, you had two options. You could go to a chess club and hope someone was available, or you could send your moves through the postal service and wait weeks for a reply. If you wanted to find a game at your exact skill level, you were dependent on the social luck of who happened to show up at your club that night. If you wanted to play at 2 a.m. because you couldn't sleep, you were out of luck entirely.

Everything about that picture has changed. Today, hundreds of thousands of people play chess online simultaneously, at all hours, on every continent, against opponents whose ratings are within 50 points of their own, in games that can last three minutes or three hours. They learn from computer analysis of their own games, follow grandmaster streams live on Twitch, solve puzzles on their phones during commutes, and participate in international tournaments from their living rooms.

This revolution — which unfolded over roughly thirty years — did not just change how chess is played. It changed what chess is: who plays it, how they relate to it, what they expect from it, and what it means in their lives. And it created the infrastructure that makes a game like BigChess possible.

BigChess — the 10×10 chess variant with the Clone piece (a bishop+knight hybrid), triple pawn steps, and extended en passant, available at bigchessgame.com — could not have existed in 1990. It requires real-time global matchmaking, ELO rating systems that work from day one, mobile platforms, global player bases, and the cultural normalization of playing chess online with strangers. It requires everything that the online chess revolution built.

Before the Internet: Chess in the Physical World

Pre-internet chess had a quality that is hard to fully appreciate in retrospect: it was slow. Not merely in the sense that games took longer to play, but in the sense that the entire culture of chess moved at a different pace.

Learning chess meant finding a teacher, buying books, and spending months — sometimes years — working through printed materials with no interactive feedback. If you worked through a book's exercises and couldn't figure out why a particular combination worked, you might wait until the next club meeting to ask someone, and if no one there could explain it, the question could remain unanswered for months.

Staying current with theory meant subscribing to magazines — Chess Life in the United States, British Chess Magazine in the UK, Informator from Yugoslavia — that arrived monthly or quarterly with carefully annotated games. If there was a major theoretical development in the Sicilian Najdorf, you might not hear about it for several weeks. If you lived outside the major chess hubs, you might not hear about it for longer.

Finding opponents of similar strength was an ongoing challenge. Chess clubs existed in most cities, but club membership varied enormously in depth and strength. A player in a large city might have access to dozens of strong opponents at a variety of levels. A player in a small town might be the strongest player in a 50-mile radius, with no competitive games available at all.

Correspondence chess — games played by mail, with moves sent on postcards over weeks or months — offered one solution to the opponent-finding problem. National and international correspondence tournaments existed, and many strong players pursued postal chess as their primary competitive outlet. But it was slow in a way that could be maddening for players who wanted to improve quickly through rapid feedback.

The World Championship as Cultural Event

In this environment, the World Chess Championship occupied a cultural space that is hard to imagine today. When Bobby Fischer challenged Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972, the match became an international news event — covered on front pages worldwide, broadcast on television, followed by people who had never played a game of chess in their lives. When Kasparov and Karpov played their epic 1984-1985 match, which lasted for 48 games before being suspended, chess occupied the consciousness of millions.

The championship had this cultural reach partly because it was rare. There was one match every few years. There was one world champion at any given time. The drama was concentrated and singular. This is very different from the modern chess world, where world championships and super-tournaments unfold simultaneously on multiple platforms, accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

The Internet Chess Club: The First Online Revolution (1995)

The Internet Chess Club (ICC) launched in 1995, and while it was not the absolute first online chess platform — some earlier bulletin board systems and online services had offered chess — it was the first to create a genuinely functional, real-time online chess community at scale.

The ICC's innovation was simple and transformative: it allowed players around the world to find opponents of their approximate skill level and play real-time games with time controls ranging from one minute to several hours. For the first time, a player could log on at any hour of the day or night, be matched with an appropriate opponent in seconds, and play a game immediately.

For chess players who had grown up in the pre-internet era, this was astonishing. Players who had previously played perhaps five or ten serious games per month could now play fifty per day if they chose. The speed of improvement for dedicated players accelerated dramatically. The experience of chess changed from a social activity planned around club schedules to an on-demand resource always available on demand.

The ICC also hosted grandmaster games in real time, with commentary, allowing club players to follow world-class games as they unfolded — something that had previously required physical attendance at tournaments. Chess began to acquire the real-time spectator quality that was previously impossible.

Chess.com and Lichess: The Mass Market Arrives (2005–2015)

The ICC was groundbreaking but remained, essentially, a serious chess player's platform. It required a subscription fee and was designed for players who were already committed to the game. The next phase of the online chess revolution was the creation of platforms designed for mass-market accessibility: Chess.com (launched 2007) and Lichess (launched 2009).

Chess.com's strategy was to make chess as approachable as possible to non-specialists. Free accounts, interactive lessons designed for beginners, puzzles calibrated to player level, a clean interface, and social features that made it feel as much like a social network as a chess platform. Lichess took a different approach — fully free, open-source, with no premium tier at all — and became the platform of choice for players who wanted the most powerful tools without commercial friction.

The two platforms together created a new kind of chess culture. Players who might never have walked into a chess club found that the barrier to entry online was near zero. A curious teenager with a smartphone could download Chess.com, play their first game within five minutes, receive instant computer analysis of their mistakes, solve puzzles calibrated to their level, and watch live streams of grandmaster games — all without leaving their bedroom.

This democratization of access was enormously significant. By the mid-2010s, Chess.com had tens of millions of registered members. The average strength of online chess players was rising across the board, driven by the feedback loops of computer analysis and the competitive stimulation of constant play against improving opponents.

The Pandemic Boom and the Queen's Gambit Effect (2020–2021)

Then came 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which locked millions of people indoors for months, created conditions that drove an extraordinary surge of interest in chess. With sports suspended, social activities impossible, and indoor entertainment suddenly at a premium, chess offered something that few other activities could match: intellectual stimulation, social connection (through online play), and genuine competitive depth accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection.

Chess.com added millions of new members in the space of weeks. Grandmasters who had maintained modest online presences found their audiences exploding. Magnus Carlsen, the reigning world champion, began appearing in online speed chess tournaments with major prize funds. Hikaru Nakamura, one of the world's strongest blitz players, built a Twitch stream with hundreds of thousands of viewers. Chess went from a niche interest to a cultural phenomenon.

The release of "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix in October 2020 amplified this trend dramatically. The fictional story of a chess prodigy in Cold War America captivated audiences worldwide, driving millions of people to Chess.com who had never previously considered playing chess. The series won numerous awards and became one of Netflix's most-watched limited series of all time. In the weeks following its release, chess set sales increased by hundreds of percent in the United States and Europe. Chess.com sign-ups spiked to record levels.

The pandemic chess boom demonstrated something important: the audience for chess was much larger than the chess world had previously assumed. It was not a game for specialists and intellectuals — it was a game for anyone who wanted a mental challenge that rewarded practice and delivered clear, measurable improvement. The online platforms had lowered the barrier to entry. The pandemic and "The Queen's Gambit" revealed what had always been true: chess has universal appeal when it is made universally accessible.

Streaming Culture and the New Chess Celebrity (2017–Present)

The rise of streaming platforms — Twitch, YouTube — created a new kind of chess celebrity that would have been inconceivable in the pre-internet era: the grandmaster entertainer.

Hikaru Nakamura's Twitch stream is the most prominent example. Nakamura, one of the strongest blitz and bullet players in the world, built a streaming career that combined elite chess performance with entertainment value — commentary, humor, reactions, and audience interaction. He reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers for major events and tens of thousands during regular streams. His audience includes people who play chess at every level and many who simply find chess compelling to watch without playing themselves.

Magnus Carlsen, already the world's best-known chess player, extended his cultural reach through collaborations with streamers, participation in online exhibitions, and the creation of chess content companies. Other grandmasters followed: Levy Rozman (GothamChess) built a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers by teaching chess through entertaining breakdowns of high-level games. Daniel Naroditsky's "Speed Run" series, in which he plays against lower-rated players and explains his thinking in real time, became a model of chess education that previous generations could not have accessed.

The streaming era changed chess culture in a subtle but important way: it made chess watchable. Before streaming, chess was experienced almost entirely as a participatory activity — you played, you studied, you competed. Watching chess meant attending tournaments in person or following newspaper reports. Online streaming created an audience dimension that chess had never previously had at scale. This matters for the broader health of the game, because it creates casual fans who may never become serious players but who sustain the cultural space within which serious players operate.

Mobile Chess: The Gamification of Improvement

The final piece of the online chess revolution's infrastructure is mobile. The smartphone has not merely made chess more accessible — it has changed the rhythm of chess engagement in ways that shape the entire culture of the game.

Before smartphones, chess practice was a deliberate activity: you sat down with a board, or at a computer, and worked on chess intentionally. Now, chess practice is available in five-minute increments during commutes, waiting rooms, lunch breaks, and any other pocket of available time. Chess.com and Lichess's mobile apps have millions of daily active users who may never play a full-length game but engage daily with puzzles, blitz games, and mini-lessons.

The gamification of chess improvement — daily streak systems, experience points, level-ups, achievement badges — borrows from mobile gaming's psychology to make chess practice habit-forming in a way that previous generations of chess teachers could never have managed. Players who would previously have practiced chess sporadically now build daily habits around it, because the apps make practice feel rewarding even in small doses.

Bullet chess — games with one or two minutes for each side — became the predominant mode of online casual chess play partly because it fits the mobile context. Short, intense, immediately repeated if lost, satisfying if won. The three-minute blitz format became the standard for casual competition. These formats would have horrified classical players who saw long, contemplative games as chess's highest expression, but they have introduced chess to more people than any previous format in history.

Why All of This Made BigChess Possible

BigChess — designed by Ukrainian entrepreneur and Candidate Master Vilen Fatalov with 40+ years of chess experience — exists at the exact historical moment that made it viable. Let us be specific about what the online chess revolution built that BigChess relies on.

Real-Time Global Matchmaking

In 1990, a chess variant with novel pieces and a 10×10 board would have struggled to find players. You needed to find opponents who had learned the new rules, had the new pieces, and were available to play at the same time. This was a coordination problem that effectively prevented most chess variants from reaching critical mass.

BigChess's ELO matchmaking system, which pairs players of similar skill in real time, solves this problem completely. A player in São Paulo can be matched with a player in Seoul in seconds, without either party having to arrange anything in advance. The infrastructure that Chess.com and Lichess built for classical chess — and that BigChess implements for its own game — makes the coordination problem trivially solvable.

ELO Ratings from Day One

One of the persistent challenges for chess variants is the "beginner problem": because no one has established theory, everyone starts as a beginner, and it can be hard to know how strong you actually are relative to other players. BigChess addresses this with ELO ratings that begin calculating from a player's first game, providing competitive context from day one.

This is possible because BigChess is built on Nakama, a real-time multiplayer game server designed for exactly this kind of competitive online game. The technical infrastructure of BigChess's ELO system, matchmaking, and game history would have required years of custom development in earlier eras and would have been inaccessible to most players regardless. Today, it is available to anyone who downloads the app or visits the website.

Mobile-First Access

BigChess is available on iOS, Android, and web. A player can pick up BigChess on their phone with no prior experience, be playing within minutes, and have access to puzzles specifically designed for the BigChess rules — including Clone tactics that have no classical chess equivalent. This mobile-first approach is only possible because of the decade-plus of development that built robust chess infrastructure into mobile platforms.

A Global Player Base Ready for Novelty

Perhaps most importantly, the online chess revolution created a global player base that is culturally prepared for chess innovation. The millions of players who have embraced Chess960, who follow grandmaster streams, who play blitz on their phones, who participated in the pandemic chess boom — these are players who understand chess as a living culture, not a frozen tradition. They are open to new formats, new rules, new challenges. They are exactly the audience that BigChess needs.

BigChess at the Right Moment in History

The Clone — the bishop+knight compound piece that Capablanca proposed and four centuries of chess inventors independently rediscovered — needed the right moment to flourish. It needed a platform that could match players globally, rate them accurately, teach them the new rules interactively, and deliver puzzles that build the novel tactical skills the game requires.

It needed streaming culture to normalize chess entertainment. It needed mobile platforms to make access frictionless. It needed the pandemic chess boom to demonstrate that the audience for chess innovation is enormous. It needed all of this before it could become what it now is: a complete, polished, globally accessible chess game with ELO matchmaking, puzzles, and game history, available at the tap of a screen.

The Internet Chess Club pioneered online chess. Chess.com and Lichess democratized it. "The Queen's Gambit" made it a cultural phenomenon. Streaming made it watchable. Mobile made it ubiquitous.

BigChess makes it new again.

Play BigChess — The Game That the Online Revolution Made Possible

10×10 board — 100 squares of chess space, ready to be explored
The Clone — bishop+knight hybrid, the piece that has been proposed across four centuries and is now fully realized
Triple pawn step — opening dynamics that no existing theory addresses
Extended en passant — capturing on any square a triple-advancing pawn passed through
Three-square castling — deeper king safety on the wider board
ELO matchmaking — competitive from your very first game
Puzzles — learn Clone tactics with purpose-built exercises
Game history — review, analyze, and improve

Available on web, iOS, and Android.

The revolution that built the online chess world was leading here. Play BigChess at bigchessgame.com.