“Tyler1 is yet another example which shows how chess is changing,” Hikaru Nakamura comments on the evolution of chess

Prominent chess Grandmaster and content creator, Hikaru Nakamura, prodded a discussion among the chess community with a statement on X/Twitter. He talked about the growth of chess and highlighted influencer Tyler1 as an example of the game's evolution.

Nakamura posted: "I met a friend of a friend last night, and they said they have played chess over the last four years and gotten to 2200 in Blitz despite never playing Classical OTB (over-the-board) chess. In olden times this would be impossible," the Grandmaster posted.

He then mentioned the eccentric content creator, Tyler1, who recently achieved a new milestone in his chess ELO. "[Tyler1] is yet another example which shows how chess is changing."

Chess has indeed shown changes over the past couple of years. Following the rise of live-streaming, online chess became more prevalent. Coupled with the effect of the global pandemic in 2020, chess received more attention than ever before.

The rise of chess was backed up with the presence of Hikaru Nakamura on Twitch who began live-streaming his high-profile matches in 2018. At the time of writing, the most popular chess site, Chess.com, has collected more than 170 million members!

The chess wave sees more players improving at the game at an insane progress. There are substantial number of resources across the internet such as the Chessable courses. A ton of valuable information for chess are accessible, unlike the olden days.

According to Nakamura, this is proven with the success of Tyler1. The influencer is known for his League of Legends content, but he has recently been deep into online chess. He would continuously play Rapid games and shown shocking improvement. In only nine months, Tyler1 rose from 200 ELO to 1800, breaking into the top 99% of chess players.