Will chess be America’s next spectator sport? Magnus Carlsen would like to think so

At 24, Kaja Snare didn’t imagine she had a future in chess; she barely played the game. But in 2014, when she was a rookie sports reporter for TV2, Norway’s second-largest broadcast network, her bosses assigned her to cover a chess tournament featuring Magnus Carlsen, who was then a 23-year-old Norwegian phenom.

Carlsen had skyrocketed from a 13-year-old grandmaster to International Chess Federation (FIDE) World Champion, captivating Norway along the way. In the decade that Carlsen held that title, a million Norwegians—20% of the country’s population—watched every time he defended it.

“The whole country got obsessed,” Snare recalls, sipping a craft beer at a chess-themed bar in Oslo called the Good Knight. The bar, where patrons gather to play and watch tournaments, opened in 2018 ahead of that year’s World Championship.

Though Carlsen no longer competes in the FIDE World Championship (he participates in FIDE’s World Blitz Chess Championship and in non-FIDE tournaments), chess remains a popular spectator sport in his home country. According to Norway’s largest network, NRK TV, an average of 214,000 viewers tune into pro chess tournament events—including a 54% share of viewers ages 10 to 79. Meanwhile, Snare has become one of the sport’s best-known commentators, first at TV2 and then at NRK.

Today, she works for Take Take Take, a startup cofounded by none other than Carlsen. Launched in early 2023 under the name Fantasy Chess, Take Take Take has $3 million in funding from A-list investors and chess enthusiasts, including Peter Thiel; Jim Breyer; and Breakthrough Initiatives fund, whose founders include Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Yuri Milner. The company launched its mobile app—which fans can use to watch live chess, follow their favorite players, and access stats and commentary—on Friday for iOS and Android.

The company has an ambitious goal: to re-create the chess craze that has swept Norway over the past decade and convert some of the 605 million people who play chess regularly, according to YouGov, into avid fans of the professional sport.

“We want this to be the go-to platform for viewing chess,” says Carlsen, who will offer daily tournament recap videos and analyze player performance during major tournaments. Snare will offer commentary on live match broadcasts. Take Take Take will debut this approach with November’s FIDE World Chess Championship in Singapore, where current world champ Ding Liren will defend his title.

The approach will borrow elements from Norwegian TV, which includes catering to casual viewers by focusing on the players’ emotions during pivotal moments. Those are often highlighted by sudden swings in the “eval bar,” a real-time data visualization that shows each player’s chances of winning—and can be upended by a particularly strong move. (In Norway, “Sjå på pilen!” or “Look at the arrow!” has become a catchphrase in chess broadcasts, akin to “Gooooal” in soccer.) In-app broadcasts will supplement the eval bar with playful touches like emojis superimposed on chess pieces—a sweating emoji for a threatened piece or a smiley for a piece that has captured another—giving viewers a fun, intuitive way to follow the action.

Take Take Take—named for the rapid back-and-forth exchanges of pieces in chess—marks Carlsen’s second chess-related startup. His first, Play Magnus, allowed users to improve their skills by challenging a bot version of Carlsen at different stages of his chess development, from a 5-year-old beginner to the 23-year-old world champ. PlayMagnus was sold to Chess.com for $80 million in 2022.

Take Take Take grew out of an innovative concept Carlsen introduced in Norway last year: Fantasy Chess. Debuting in a closed beta at the Norway Chess tournament in May 2023, Fantasy Chess let fans draft individual pieces from professional players, and tracked points for captures and losses. In November, Carlsen brought on Mats André Kristiansen as cofounder and CEO. Since then, the venture’s 10-person team—including Snare and FIDE chess master Lucas Ranaldi as head of operations—has shifted the company’s focus to the app that launched Friday. Kristiansen says Fantasy Chess will eventually be added to the app.

Chess has flirted with mainstream popularity before. In 1972, the world championship match between American Bobby Fischer and the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky—a microcosm of the Cold War—captured global attention and sparked hopes of making chess a televised spectator sport. By the 1980s, though, interest had waned. But after 40 years of fallow chess fandom, the ground has never been more fertile for a chess spectator culture to take root. Chess.com now has 180 million monthly users thanks to a chess boom that’s been partially driven by the game’s popularity on streaming platforms like Twitch, where users collectively watch 154,000 hours of chess every day.

Ironically, while computers’ dominance over human players—embodied in Garry Kasparov’s 1997 loss to IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer—was once seen as the end of the sport, Carlsen and Kristiansen believe it may actually be what saves it. Real-time analysis tools like the evaluation bar give casual fans an accessible understanding of grandmasters’ strategies, allowing them to appreciate the brilliance behind each move—or, at the very least, enabling a commentator to explain it.

“In five years, chess will sell out Madison Square Garden,” Kristiansen says. He envisions chess matches produced like prizefights, with two players in a central ring and thousands of fans “screaming the moves, cheering their favorite players. That’s the vision.”