Содержание
Boxing, football, MMA, esports — there’s hardly a sport iGaming hasn’t touched. Casinos sponsor teams, run events, and sign ambassador deals with high-profile athletes across every discipline imaginable. Yet there’s one sport that iGaming has almost entirely overlooked — chess. But is that fair? The Alanbase team dug into the chess industry and broke down in this article why the pieces on the board could turn into a goldmine down the line.
Inside the piece:
- what a game of chess and a casino slot have in common;
- how the world’s leading grandmaster is bringing chess and gambling closer together;
- why the Covid pandemic and Twitch pushed chess into the mainstream;
- how much chess streamers really earn;
- which geos love chess the most.
More in common than it seems
At first glance, gambling and chess share absolutely nothing. The first is heavily driven by luck, while the second is pure science, where everything comes down to intellect and strategic thinking. But dig a little deeper and the common ground is there after all:
- A strategic approach is no stranger to gamblers either. The community has spent years developing new tactics to squeeze out the maximum edge. And the variety is genuinely impressive: from blackjack combination charts and staking systems (Martingale, parlay, and so on), gamblers go all the way to trying to calculate the outcome of slots and roulette mathematically.
- Chess players feel the rush too. Beyond the basic psychology, this has been noted many times on specialist resources. For example, plenty of users on chess.com, the largest chess site in the world, have written on the forums that after a win they feel such a strong high that they want to do it all over again. And after a loss comes the urge to win it back — sound familiar? It’s exactly what drives gamblers.
- A cool head is the key to winning. This is what makes chess so much like poker, where among pros psychology decides more than skill. After a lost game comes «tilt» — a mental or emotional breakdown that often leads to mistakes. And while the pressure of money isn’t as intense in chess, grandmasters know that feeling like nothing else. YouTube is full of clips of players quitting a game after a bad move, and rage-quit threads are plenty popular on the chess.com forums. So tilt resistance in chess matters no less than intellect: over the long run it shapes results as much as any combination.
Two worlds moving closer
For a long time casinos and betting simply ignored chess: it’s a sport, sure, but its core audience was far removed from wagering. Times change, though — the pieces on the board are drawing mass attention, and the iGaming sector has finally turned toward them.
And it all started with none other than Magnus Carlsen, five-time world champion and the most famous chess player of the 21st century. He was the one who kicked off the convergence of the gambling and intellectual worlds. In late 2024 the grandmaster became a BETBY ambassador and the face of their «Make Your Move» campaign — and, judging by the operator’s press release, on a long-term contract. By January 2025 Carlsen was representing the company at ICE Barcelona 2025, where he shared his passion for fantasy sports (virtual games based on real leagues) and poker, and noted that chess is seriously gaining popularity:
«I think the last few years have been very good for chess. It’s becoming more accessible to more people, which brings it into the mainstream. I’m glad to see it.»
And BETBY isn’t easing off the gas: in May 2025 Magnus hosted and organized the iGaming Chess World Championships at the NEXT Summit in Malta. First Carlsen shared his take on the parallels between gambling and chess and on how chess experience can be carried over into building an iGaming business. Then, in the main event, the grandmaster ran a chess tournament among representatives of the gambling market.
«Chess and iGaming share the same fundamental principles of strategy, analysis, and competition. Having Magnus Carlsen bring his experience to the summit and run this one-of-a-kind tournament together with BETBY is an incredible chance for attendees to feel the intersection of two fast-growing industries,» — Pierre Lindh, co-founder of NEXT.io.
And in January 2026 BETBY went even further, bringing three stars to ICE Barcelona at once: alongside Carlsen, the chess masterclass for guests was led by Hikaru Nakamura and Levy Rozman (GothamChess).
How does this help chess and iGaming converge?
The conclusion writes itself: if the BETBY–Carlsen partnership delivers, gambling operators will start paying more attention to this intellectual sport in its wake. And after that come sponsorships, tournament organizing, and ambassador deals with high-profile grandmasters and chess streamers.
Prospects and revenue
The upside for chess from moving closer to iGaming is obvious, but you might be wondering: where’s the profit for gambling here? It’s that change is coming even to a market as conservative as chess, and, as mentioned above, the sport is growing its audience and going mainstream.
Ironically, the breakthrough came in the Covid year of 2020, when other sports lost their crowds in the stands or paused altogether. The trigger was Netflix’s «The Queen’s Gambit,» which racked up 62 million views in a month and won over viewers worldwide. And in the show’s wake came unexpected success on Twitch: influencers whose chess streams built audiences and donations blew up on the platform overnight.
One vivid example of that success is the sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez. The two have been streaming chess on Twitch since 2017, but the breakthrough only came during the pandemic: if in May 2020 the Botezlive channel had 73,000 followers, by December that number had grown to 500,000 (today it’s 1.3 million).
For that the sisters were nominated for the Dexerto Awards «Streamer Breakthrough of the Year,» and off the back of it they signed with the esports organization Envy Gaming. Along with the audience and recognition came the money: per Alexandra, streaming chess brings her and her sister $100,000 a year, with that figure expected to grow to $500,000 down the line.
But it’s not just the Botez sisters. Other chess streamers’ revenue is impressive too — the top five earners for 2022–2025:
- GM Hikaru: $773,831.12;
- Chessbrah: $767,384.56;
- Chess: $499,677.45;
- GothamChess: $424,505.01;
- BotezLive: $416,813.43.
And the first name is worth a closer look. GM Hikaru (Hikaru Nakamura) isn’t just a top-earning streamer and a millionaire blogger (2 million followers on Twitch and over 3 million on YouTube) — he’s a grandmaster respected across the community: he’s won the U.S. Championship five times and currently sits second in the world FIDE rankings. Quite the candidate for an iGaming operator’s ambassador, no?
So what about the audience?
As the streamers’ popularity grows, so does the chess market itself — and the money there is anything but modest. According to Fortune Business Insights, in 2025 the market for the game of pieces on a board was valued at $3.7 billion, and it’s set to grow far faster than before — 10.9% a year, reaching $7.64 billion by 2032. Checkmate, skeptics!
And what’s most surprising is that the chess audience is fundamentally young. Per Chess.com’s own figures, by the first quarter of 2026 the site had passed 252 million registered users, with an average of 9.7 million people logging in every day. And per Similarweb analytics (April 2026), the largest audience segment is people aged 18 to 24, the core is under 35, and 65.9% of them are men. For anyone thinking about the overlap with iGaming, it’s simply a perfect match.
By geo, the United States leads: it accounts for 25.52% of the site’s traffic. Next come India (8.18%), the United Kingdom (4.86%), and France (3.82%). In Russia the service has been blocked since 2022, but given the country’s deep chess traditions and active grandmasters, the prospects for its chess market remain more than bright.
And what do you need to track and attract traffic to any of these geos? A quality platform, of course — one that helps you improve your numbers. That platform can be Alanbase, because we put it all in one window: partners, offers, analytics, and payouts.
To see Alanbase from the inside, sign up for a demo call with our manager. On the demo we’ll gather your requirements for the affiliate program and build a ready preset of dashboards and stats for your free 14-day trial — no credit card required.
