how many people are playing here?

When you first go to live chess you'll get some stats

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For a rough estimate maybe we could use the Pareto principle and say that 20% of those people play at least one game every day, and let's just guess the rest play once a week. So for 150,000 people we'll say 30K of them are daily users and 120K are weekly.

Let's also guess that on average people play for 2 hours. So a 24 hour day is divided into 12 parts. We need users to work all 12 shifts so to speak.

So we have 30k x 12 = 360,000 users who log on to play live chess every day.
And for weekly we'll need 12x7 = 84 shifts. 84 x 120K = ~10 million.

So we might guess about 10.4 million unique players in live chess last month.

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Through a different method I wont get into I estimated 100 million live games played last month.

We can also estimate from here:
https://www.chess.com/article/view/interesting-chess-data-time-controls-and-game-results

That the average game (rough estimate) lasts about 10 minutes. So if our estimate of playing for 2 hours is correct, we should expect each player to play about 12 games. 10 million people play 5 million games if everyone plays 1, so if everyone plays 12 that is 60 million a month.

Hmm, off by a factor of about 2. But I guess most players are noobs, most noobs play long time controls, and most noobs don't use all their time.

Anyway, for live chess about 10 million visitors (who actually play a game) a month seems like a semi reasonable guess.

That's not counting people who log in and play correspondence, variants, or log in for socializing in clubs, so you could probably safely double this number if you want to count people who log on.

And then for pageviews (users who search "chess" but don't have account) who knows. Maybe x10 or more.

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See also:
https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-month-in-review-november-2020

Oh, but with Queen's Gambit there is probably a higher density of unique users... what I mean is, people might play 5 games then quit the site forever. So 10 million unique visitors per month in live chess is probably the minimum. In reality it might be 2-5x larger.

But ok, that's my ballpark estimate, 10s of millions.

Or a easier way

There

Yes, in 2017 there were much fewer people

https://www.chess.com/blog/erik/incredible-second-wave-of-interest-in-chess

But even so, this random guess is not very good, and far too low, because even in 2017 we know there were 1.5 million games played in one day just in live chess:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/interesting-chess-data-time-controls-and-game-results

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And we see Google is simply returning the message of some random forum guy. Actually reading the forum gives better information:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/how-many-people-are-actually-active-on-chess-com