"It's A Cool Experience": How This Creator Makes The Most Of Live Audiences

Coach of the Month last February, DaVaun Williams, a.k.a. H1Chess, is now the Creator of the Month for March 2025! DaVaun has over 220,000 TikTok followers, nearly 100,000 on YouTube, and 4,000 on Twitch. In all three places, you can find him proffering advice in a highly-engaging style that continues to grow his audience after four years and counting of dedication and hard work. 

Chess.com spoke with DaVaun recently about his start and influences in content creation, his favorite things about creating, and more.

How long have you been creating chess content, and what made you decide to start?

I started creating content four years ago. I was inspired by the content creators I watched: Chessbrah, IM John Bartholomew, Ben Simon, even back when Danny Rensch used to make content! I wanted to spread the same joy I had when I was younger to the next era.

Obviously you've grown your audience a lot, so it seems you're succeeding in bringing that joy.

Doing live lessons, especially on TikTok, I've experienced it with hundreds of people. Chess is big now on TikTok, but when I was starting, it was brand new. I was putting out my videos and doing live streams and I don't know if you ever seen the live streams when I'm trying to guide the audience into the best move in a position. Maybe it's a grandmaster game of old or maybe it's a GM Magnus Carlsen game or whatnot. It's a cool experience being able to teach people and have a live interaction.

TikTok is vertical so people are in and out, but a lot of people will stay for the whole lesson because they want to see the end of the game. I share a little bit of nuggets here and there about how to be better at chess and answer as many questions as possible. It reminds me of when I was teaching at schools in person before I started doing content creation. I like that interaction way more than anything else. 

How do you think you as a content creator or the content itself has evolved from where you started to now?

I actually started out with a podcast about four years ago, but now I make short form content on TikTok and I stream Monday through Friday. I still make YouTube videos and podcast episodes too. So that's what I do nowadays and how everything evolved all together.

I also don't make some of the mistakes that I was making beforehand, when I was putting out videos that I thought up in my head, before I realized that the internet is very strict on some things. And so I'm a little bit more conscious on the content that I put out and the specific wording that I have to use. There would be times I'd say one wrong thing might have to scratch future videos I'd already drafted. So that's one thing that I had to learn.

@h1chess" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@h1chess?refer=embed" rel="ugc nofollow noreferrer noopener">@h1chess Any Danish Gambit players out there? 😄 #chesstiktok #chessman #chesstok #chess #chessgame ♬ Hip Hop with impressive piano sound(793766) - Dusty Sky

When you were coach of the month you mentioned GM Yasser Seirawan as a big influence. Has he influenced your content as well?

I learned a lot of stuff from him, honestly more than any other person. It was a long time ago, but he still has these lessons on YouTube with the Saint Louis Chess Club. I remember being 13, 14 years old and just watching his videos. I also had this old DVD by him. I forget what it was called, but I still have it to this day.

Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process?

When the camera turns on, I'm just being myself and keeping in mind the questions beginners need answered.

I have my process, I don't just do the video. I found out if I go ahead and just do a video, it becomes very rigid and very bland, so I usually try to get into a relaxed moment. It might be hard to find them, but there are several videos that I put out as funny side videos where I mess up very stupidly in a video. And I was putting out bloopers for a very long time, or sometimes I even put on some music before I do a video. That's one of the things that I have to do to get more personality in the video.

Who are some of your favorite chess content creators, and why?

Seeing top chess players compete at important tournaments is exciting to watch. I get to see beautiful tactics and new opening ideas to use in my own games and I just like watching how they play and how they think. Once you start playing chess, all you want to do is improve and get better and get your Elo up there. And then you watch all these videos just thinking to yourself, "How is it possible for these guys to know how to do this!?"

I watch Hikaru Nakamura and mostly titled players. Daniel Naroditsky too; it's very instructive how he thinks on the calculation side.

Imagine you could do a chess-based collab with anyone in the world. Who would it be, and why?

I could never choose because there are so many good chess content creators! I'm just a guy that's trying to provide the best content for viewers.

What is your single favorite piece of chess content you've ever created?

I don't have a favorite piece of content, but I appreciate the audience for my Live Stream Lessons on Twitch.

I went to a chess club recently and someone told me, "I watched your videos and I actually got to this rating from watching your videos." That is really awesome. It's really cool to meet people in real life that watch your videos. On your end, you might think that it's just a whole bunch of numbers—especially if you stay inside the house all the time—but when you go out there in the real world, it kind of puts everything into perspective. I need to be more mindful that each one of these numbers is a whole person with their whole life, and they're spending their time watching my videos.