Cover Chess streamer, woman grandmaster and Fide master Qiyu “Nemo” Zhou (Photo: courtesy of Nemo Zhou)
Chess streamer, woman grandmaster and Fide master Qiyu “Nemo” Zhou (Photo: courtesy of Nemo Zhou)
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In Hong Kong, chess is in the midst of a renaissance among younger, chiefly Gen Z and Gen Alpha players. Is this famously nerdy, intellectual game becoming “cool”?
At one end of a candlelit salon, pairs of strangers hunch over chessboards, bobbing their heads to thumping house music; at the other, a DJ spins vinyl records for a gathering crowd. Occasionally, someone saunters over from the dance floor towards the tidy rows of chess players, glass of wine in hand; no tables are free yet. Everyone wants to play.
The party is one of many hosted by Hong Kong’s “Chess Mafia”—an oxymoron of a name befitting the scrappy, fast-growing social group combining two seemingly incompatible pastimes: brain games and partying. Since its launch in early 2026, Chess Mafia has organised monthly soirées in bars and cafés around the city in collaboration with local artists, attracting upwards of 50 people a night. Chess is just the beginning, according to Shum Pui Yi, the group’s founder, who also goes by “Spy”—an acronym of his initials.
“AI already beat humans in chess such a long time ago, so I feel like a lot of chess players have come into this anxiety that there’s no way we, with our rational minds, will be better than the most amazing machines out there,” says Shum, referring to the triumph of IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer over the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, a watershed moment in the game’s history. “I think chess has shifted from something where people compete just to win, or where winning is the whole point, to becoming more cultural.”
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Above A Chess Mafia evening hosted at Frank’s Records in Hong Kong (Photo: Cat Wang)
A Chess Mafia evening hosted at Frank’s Records in Hong Kong (Photo: Cat Wang)
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Chess, which can be traced back to 6th-century India as chaturanga, a military strategy simulation, has earned a reputation as a cerebral game—so much so that skill at the game is regarded as a marker of intelligence itself. It is generally not associated with music, or partying, or just having a good time. As Kasparov himself famously remarked, “Chess is mental torture.”
Yet across Hong Kong, a new scene is emerging in which chess might shed its image as a punishing intellectual exercise. Event organisers and entrepreneurs alike are uniting behind a broader repositioning of the game: to make it less stuffy and intimidating, and potentially, a part of younger people’s social lives.
Chess’s surge in popularity over the past half-decade dovetails with cultural trends that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. First, in 2020, came the viral debut of Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit; as social-distancing measures sparked interest in online games, chess took off on web platforms including Chess.com and Lichess; and content creators, livestreamers and celebrities helped introduce new audiences to the game, including Liverpool football star Mohamed Salah, who proudly described himself as a “chess addict” in 2023.
Online, more people than ever have taken up the game. Chess.com reported it had 100 million members in December 2022; by February 2026, that figure had reached 250 million, and in the first quarter of this year alone, the platform recorded 2.6 billion games played.
Still, in Hong Kong, chess has remained largely confined to classrooms and formal tournaments. The city has nearly 2,000 total registered players, according to statistics from the International Chess Federation—known as Fide, from the French “Fédération Internationale des Échecs”—and only 200 to 240 active Fide-rated classical chess players; Hong Kong has yet to produce a grandmaster, the highest chess title awarded by Fide.
But the city’s chess scene is taking on new scope. Its largest, most successful chess event took place in June: the Fide World Team Rapid and Blitz Championships, which brought more than 70 of the world’s top 100 players to Queen Elizabeth Stadium. Geoffrey Kao, honorary president of the Hong Kong China Chess Federation, says what set the event apart was a deliberate effort to make chess more entertaining, and by extension, more accessible.
“I’m not a chess player, I’m a spectator,” says Kao. “I designed the tournament from a spectator’s point of view, not from a player’s.”
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A crowd watches on at the Fide World Team Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships 2026 (Photo: courtesy of the Hong Kong China Chess Federation)
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For the first two days of the championship, the Fide team insisted on setting up vast, hushed tournament halls, without stands for audience members. “They thought there wouldn’t be spectators coming anyway,” Kao quips. He pushed to overhaul the set-up entirely, instead presenting chess more like a conventional sporting event, akin to a basketball match, or a concert: with digital scoreboards, booklets explaining each player, half-time performances, and eye-catching banners with pink, orange and blue accents clearly displaying the tournament’s name and location. He also bet on a blitz of merchandise, including collectable keychains, chessboards and T-shirts.
Kao’s strategy as an organiser paid off. Ticket sales for the five-day event cleared HK$1 million excluding merchandise sales, with between 6,000 and 7,000 tickets sold in total, he says. The event proved to be even more popular than expected: mobs of autograph-seekers, many of whom were children and teenagers, frequently overwhelmed the venue’s security guards.
While chess players in Hong Kong used to game alone in their bedrooms, during the tournament, “People were coming out to say, ‘Hey, I’m a chess fan’,” and posting about the matches on social media, Kao says. “This event actually helped turn chess from some boring little silent room to a cool event.”
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Creating variants of chess with altered rules or set-ups has been another way to reinvigorate the 1,500-year-old game, particularly with computers now dominating chess at every level. A prime example is Chess960, or Fischer Random, devised by grandmaster Bobby Fischer in the 1990s, in which the pieces’ starting positions are scrambled, effectively neutralising the benefits of memorising opening theory.
Another variant, Anichess, has taken off in Hong Kong. Originally developed by Web3 group Animoca Brands—led by Yat Siu, its co-founder and executive chairman, and a Tatler Most Influential honouree—the game adds what Chevan Tin, co-founder and head of Anichess, calls “a drop of magic” onto the board’s standard 64 squares. Players can use “spells”, or rule-breaking changes, such as turning a piece invisible or conjuring a pawn onto an empty square.
“Anichess is a more innovative kind of chess,” says Tin. Classical chess games, which can run upwards of three hours, “could be boring” for younger players, he says; with animations and rapid gameplay, Anichess is “meant to be more fun, more engaging, especially for the younger generation, because we see them growing up playing games like Roblox, and they’re used to social media and fast-paced content, like TikTok”.
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Chess grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Olexandr Bortnyk duel in Anichess (Photo: courtesy of Anichess)
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While reshaping the game for Gen Z and Gen Alpha tastes, Tin and his team braced for scepticism. “We were just very worried that maybe the most competitive chess players were not going to be fans,” says Tin, a chess aficionado who competes recreationally. “To our surprise, they were actually quite excited.” Its supporters so far have included grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who joined Anichess as a partner and collaborator in early 2024 to help develop the game.
Over the past two years, Anichess has garnered more than a million registered players. At in-person activations, including a luncheon that featured Carlsen upon his visit to Hong Kong in June, an under-30 demographic has taken the lead. Whether these variants will meaningfully expand the game’s core audience—or simply repackage it for a different platform—remains an open question. But for now, Tin is betting on momentum: “We remain relatively bullish on the next generation,” he says. “More and more of them are going to be interested in the chess variant space.”
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An undisputed expert at reaching the next generation is Qiyu Zhou, known to her audience of over 2.5 million followers across platforms as Nemo. At 26, the Canadian streamer, woman grandmaster and Fide master is herself a member of the Gen Z cohort driving the game’s revival. Zhou visited Hong Kong in June for both the Fide World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships and Anichess’s luncheon. “The Hong Kong chess scene looks very bustling,” she says, pointing to the game’s popularity with local clubs and school programmes alike.
Zhou, who regularly films herself playing against strangers, points to the power of chess as an icebreaker. With social media, “it’s easier than ever to stay connected with people but at the same time, you’re sort of missing that genuine human-to-human, person-to-person interaction that I believe is what makes chess such a great game.”
At these events, “chess is just like, no walls up,” she says. “If you want to socialise a little bit more, you can socialise. And I think that’s very freeing to a lot of people.”
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Still, the game’s revival hasn’t erased all of its past baggage. In the face of “age-old” assumptions that women are worse at chess—a result of decades in which few women played competitively at all—and “deep-rooted elitism” in the game, Zhou argues chess maintains appeal as a fundamentally meritocratic game. “It’s a great equaliser,” she says.
The move to make the game more equal is spreading beyond the chessboard itself, and looking ahead, Hong Kong is only one piece on a considerably larger board. While working with clubs across Asia, the Chess Mafia group is tapping into other games, including Go, the game of dotted black-and-white tiles with roots in China dating back some 2,500 years, and Chinese chess, or xiangqi. One collaboration, dubbed “Knight Market”—a pun on the horse-shaped chess piece—livestreamed simultaneous games with the Seoul Chess Club and the Taipei-based Stressless Chess Club.
Whether through R&B lounges or jam-packed stadiums, chess’s rising appeal may ultimately have less to do with the game’s format than the people playing it.
“For people first entering chess, go out, have fun, enjoy, talk to people,” Zhou says. “People are cool. A lot of folks have really interesting stories.”
Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
