The near global lockdown during the pandemic meant that most sporting activities including over-the-board chess tournaments, were cancelled. However, online chess across different digital platforms thrived as new players, streamers and audiences started taking to the game. In India, comedian-streamers and chess players came together to live-stream casual games and major tournaments in an entertaining fashion, attracting a newer, younger fan base to the sport. The growing Indian fan-base brought in a larger market, greater interest in the Indian players from international tournament organizers, and also, led to the organization of the Chess Olympiad 2022 in Chennai, India. It also brought about a digital fan community.
These online fans were not only playing amateur chess in large numbers, but also organizing tournaments, trying to logistically help the Indian Team, and mobilizing support to give chess players national sporting awards. At the same time, the digital transformation also brought in new anxieties and concerns – online trolling, rises in cases of cheating, and concerns over format dilution. More interestingly, the fan community, often, extended beyond just the sport. With social media, the fans could not only interact with players and content creators, but also with each other, coming together as a community – channelizing anxieties and uncertainties of the pandemic, forging new friendships, organizing charity events.
Using interview methods and cyber-ethnographic tools, this paper attempts to understand this intertwining of the digital and sporting cultures, and its impact on the lives of the fans and the players. I will try to examine the dynamics of such a digital fandom and the sport they follow, through the perspective of the fans and streamers themselves. The wider aim of the research is to look at the role digital media and online communities can play, and the new complexities and processes in sports.
