The Top YouTube Chess Channels | Congrats To GothamChess On #1!!!
2020 and 2021 have been big years for chess, but perhaps no chess creator has had a bigger past year than GothamChess. The "internet's chess teacher" went from nearly no YouTube subscribers to 1,000,000 in just one calendar year. His video on how to play chess has nearly 1.5 million views meaning he's taught more than a million people to play chess!
Today Levy reached 1,170,000 subscribers on YouTube making him the largest chess channel on the platform. Congrats to him and all of the great creators teaching and celebrating chess on YouTube each day. Here's a visualization of the largest chess channels over the years.
The top YouTube chess channels in September 2021:
- GothamChess
- agadmator's Chess Channel
- GMHikaru
- Chess Talk
- ChessBase India
- Samay Raina
- Chess.com
- Magnus Carlsen
- BotezLive
- thechesswebsite
- ReyDama
- Eric Rosen
- ChessNetwork
- Школа Шахмат ChessMaster
- Saint Louis Chess Club
- Partidas Inmortales de Ajedrez
- Chess.comES
- Luis Fernandez Siles
- Manuel Morsa
- CoffeeChess
Notes on the data:
I used data from the Wayback Machine and socialblade.com to build this, but the data is incomplete. Data values are interpolated where data is missing so some rapid rises may be smoothed out, and some channels may jump into the lists. Some channel names have changed over time. For example, ChessVibes is now ChesscomNews and Satranc Mediya is now Chess24 Turkce. There is also no comprehensive list of chess channels to draw on; I was as comprehensive as I could be based on my knowledge 
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I'm the Head of Community for Chess.com. I earned the National Master title in 2012, and in 2014, I returned to my home state of South Carolina to start Strategery: Chess and Games. In late 2015, I began working for Chess.com and haven't looked back since.
You can find my personal content on Twitch , Twitter , and YouTube where I further indulge my love of chess.
