Cricket in India has become a rich, money-spinning sport after Indian Premier League was started. Even before that Cricket was hugely popular in India, and flush with funds. However, since IPL it has become a multi-billion dollar “business”. Pat of the reason is huge popularity. But the other part of it is the fact that it’s a spectators sport i.e. people pay for watching the matches – be it on TV or in stadium.
Chess is also becoming hugely popular in India. To give you a perspective, India had just 4 chess grandmasters at the turn on the century in 2000. Today India has 82 grandmasters! So in terms of popularity and fan following it is fairly big (of course, not as big as cricket because not everybody can play chess or likes to play chess). However, in terms of making money, chess is still very very poor – to the extent that all Chess events, including the World Championship, has to be sponsored by some rich person or a rich institute. Chess has not been able to crack a business model which is sustainable and profit-making. That’s mainly because, it’s not a spectators-friendly sport or game. You cannot host chess matches in a stadium where 100,000 people would pay and come to watch – the way it happens in Cricket or Football or any other spectator-friendly sport.
Since COVID pandemic there has been a positive change. Chess streaming has picked up in a really big way. Many stand-up comedians have turned to chess streaming. IM Sagar Shah has become really popular through his chess videos on ChessBase India. Also, many star players have been consistently playing online chess – either exhibition/fun matches or chess tournaments. Because of all this, chess popularity is at all time high. It has also attracted attention of a lot of Corporate bigshots. A couple of noteworthy names in India are Persistent Systems and Tech Mahindra.
So I was really excited to hear that Tech Mahindra is sponsoring the Global Chess League in Dubai which has multiple teams and star-studded lineup. I had shared few days ago a video about various teams, which I’ll share here again.
Do check out the opening ceremony video of the event.
Hope this becomes a successful league and paves way to transform the Chess world the same way as IPL transformed Cricket.
Video on various teams in the Global Chess League
ekoshapu 
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