We are witnessing a phenomenal chess boom at Shalom!

Students are suddenly quite chess mad! We are lucky in having our big chess outside the junior library with its novelty oversized pieces, and we also have many sets available for playing in breaks and before and after school.

Shalom has a guest chess master who visits on Tuesday at lunch time and conducts his ‘class’ in Beerarlem. This class is now bursting at the seams and library staff are looking for alternative arrangements and new sets.

A random internet search reveals that online chess is experiencing a similar growth spurt in 2023 and their servers are struggling with the impact.

Chess.com has remarked on this growth, providing the following remarkable statistics:

• Traffic in Chess.com has almost doubled since early December 2022 and setting site records on most days
• The Chess.com app reached #2 in the Top Free Games section of the iOS app store in the US (#1 in some countries!)
• On January 19 they had one million visits from Google for the first time
• Over 300,000 members joined in a single day, over 100,000 more than at the peak of The Queen's Gambit
• 31,700,000 games were played on January 20 alone, a site record, and it is now common to see more than one million games an hour

The game of chess itself is estimated to be over 1,500 years old and is having a modern-day resurgence. It is assumed generally that this rise in popularity began in 2018 because of: Chess.com, Twitch, the COVID-19 pandemic, and The Queen's Gambit.

Whatever the cause, chess is trending now and in full swing at Shalom.