“I can lead the people,” says Levy Rozman.
That may sound like a bold claim from a 27-year-old but Rozman, with 4.29m YouTube subscribers, is clearly someone people are happy to follow. Better known online as GothamChess, he is the most popular chess YouTuber on the planet.
An engaged community of fans hangs on his every word. And he has the credentials to back up his thoughts: he is an international master. Rozman makes a video about once a day, the average length of which is around 20 minutes. His channel has more than a billion views – the first chess channel to earn this honour. In January 2023 alone, he claims, it picked up 300m.
Rozman is riding a huge chess wave; one he can take some credit in having created. There were three lightning bolts, he says. The first, and probably most significant, was The Queen’s Gambit, the stylish 2020 Netflix drama about a fictional chess prodigy, Beth Harmon; there was the rising popularity of the game on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels; and there was the Hans Niemann scandal of September 2022, in which world No 1 Magnus Carlsen accused his American opponent of cheating.
Capitalising on these developments at every turn was Rozman, who has a knack of creating videos with themes that pull in viewers. One of his videos is called I Played Beth Harmon 7 Times. The video, in which he plays bots modeled on the character at various stages of her career, has more than 6m views. Another – one of many about the Niemann scandal – is called ‘Hans Niemann Is Insane…’. Whenever a big chess story breaks, Rozman feels obliged to cover it. (He treads carefully, he says – Hikaru Nakamura, the world No 4 and a YouTuber with more than 2m followers, was named in the lawsuit Niemann brought against the various chess entities who had claimed he cheated. The suit has since been settled with no threat of further legal action).
He admits he tries to frame chess in a positive light but says the game is in a good position anyway. “All in all, it’s never been in a better place,” says Rozman, speaking from a room in his New York apartment where he makes most of his videos.
At school he did his best to hide the fact that he was a chess champion. Now, he thinks, these negative stereotypes have gone and chess players are no longer shy and retiring. “Now I have kids come up to me that tell me how much they love chess and they love my ideas, and I look at them and I go, ‘You look like you would have bullied me in school,’” he says.
Someone has to run the most popular chess channel on YouTube. But why is it Rozman?
First of all is his approachability: he looks like Daniel Radcliffe and chats to his audience about chess with a nice brand of dry, self-deprecating humour. He is as likely to talk about what soda he’s drinking as he is to pull out arcane chess terms. And he had experience in introducing people to chess, even before he started his channel.
Like most extraordinarily good players, Rozman started his chess career as a young child. In his teens, when he was studying statistics and quantitative modeling at Baruch College, he still planned to get a “serious job” after he was done playing and teaching chess. Teaching five- and six-year-olds, he learned how to command attention. In 2014, one year into his degree, he contacted local schools to see if they might let him run his own chess program, in which he would coach kids to compete in tournaments. He excelled, winning city then state titles with the children.
To be an elite chess player, Rozman says, you need a “ridiculous” ego. He realised when he ran his chess program that he enjoys controlling five or six elements of a project at the same time. His videos are entirely his own creation, with no help from a camera crew, editors, or graphics team. “I don’t know if it’s talent, I don’t know if it’s instinct,” Rozman says. “I just feel passionate about the game and I think I’m able to get ahead of what people are going to want or think, which I suppose is kind of a microcosm of chess in and of itself.”
Not long after he created GothamChess in 2018, he started to take his YouTube channel seriously. He researched what was popular on YouTube and uploaded two videos a day for months. It wasn’t until October 2020 and the arrival of The Queen’s Gambit, however, that he developed a strategy. He noticed that in the wake of the show his video about the move ‘the Queen’s Gambit’ had shot up to 700,000 views because YouTube would serve viewers with the video after they watched a trailer for the show. “That’s when I realised, wait a minute – this is a whole ecosystem,” says Rozman. He began giving people what they wanted, analysing and reacting to feedback.
Meanwhile, he says, he has given up competitive chess. “I have mental health problems,” he said in July 2022. “I don’t enjoy any of this. It’s probably killing me.” A lonely and exhausting pursuit, elite chess is now too punishing for Rozman. “I think chess exposes every major mental and emotional flaw that you have,” he says. “It’s a megaphone for it.”
Away from top-level chess, he can concentrate on bringing the game to as many people as possible. “I really, really, really wanted to become the biggest channel on YouTube because I firmly believe I can be the best voice for chess,” he says. “I’m strong enough as a player that I can analyse grandmaster games and I’m also normal enough of a person and approachable enough of a person that I know how amateurs think.”
While the chess YouTubing world thrives on conflict – in August he released a video called ‘Why I hate Chess.com’ – Rozman downplays any rivalry between the top YouTubers. He has no problem with other people making their videos and minding their own business. “If I had somebody to punch up toward, maybe I would,” he says.
His position at the top of the tree has given him the confidence to write a book, How to Win at Chess. As his dog Benji tries to chew the microphone he’s speaking into, Rozman says that the book is a road map from beginner to intermediate. He hopes in the long run that it will become the book that players recommend to newbies. “We’ll see in 30 years if people are still reading books at all,” he adds.
I wonder what kind of money the king of chess YouTube earns. He says that “YouTubers do very well” (he donated $100,000 to chess scholarships in 2021) but he won’t be drawn on a number. “I’ve never actually stated that publicly,” he says. “I think I’m saving that for maybe a profile down the line.”
How to Win At Chess by Levy Rozman (Penguin Books Ltd, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
