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I realise chess viewerships have skyrocketed due to organic growth in popularity, and especially due to more people being stuck indoors in the last year.

Are there statistics on how many viewers each chess tournament receives, and if so, what are the biggest chess tournaments by viewership (including online viewers) in recent years?

stevec
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    online viewership has grown immensely. I've already seen both hikaru and chess.com twitch streams with 50k viewers in some events. – Isac May 08 '21 at 11:44
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    Candidates, Olympiad and World Championships are probably the biggest events, but they don't occur yearly. It'll be interesting to see what the World Cup gets later this year – David May 08 '21 at 12:44
  • @David thanks for pointing that out. I will adjust the question to relax the “annual” assumption so it can cover all events include ones that aren’t annual – stevec May 08 '21 at 12:47
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    Note that it obviously make a difference of which country we talk, so your question best defaults to "worldwide". Also, how to measure the data? Data from German illustrated SPIEGEL shows e.g. the interest on the Carlsen world championship was almost top 1 in the online articles, but the press coverage was meagre. – Hauke Reddmann May 09 '21 at 08:14

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Please note, this does not answer the question, but I find this information gives some helpful clues. This is twitch daily viewerships of all chess channels combined for the past 5 years. It shows peak and average daily viewers. But it doesn't say what the events were corresponding with the heightened figures.

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Source: https://sullygnome.com/game/Chess/1825/summary

stevec
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    I believe the huge spike towards the end was due to Pogchamps 3, correct? – fartgeek May 09 '21 at 02:26
  • @fartgeek That's really interesting. I don't know much at all about Pogchamps, so I can't say. – stevec May 09 '21 at 02:35
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    I heard, but cannot confirm from any source, that on one of the days Pogchamps was taking place, chess had the most viewers out of all categories... – fartgeek May 09 '21 at 03:25