How I Make A Living Playing Chess On Twitch

being a chess player is very similar to being a struggling artist if you're a grand master that doesn't mean you're going to make a good living if you're in the top 10 then maybe but most grandmasters have to teach on the side just to be able to make it and i knew that wasn't the kind of lifestyle that i wanted my name is alexandra botez i'm 25 years old i'm a professional chess streamer living in austin texas and i make six figures a year my family comes from romania which has a really rich chess culture as opposed to in the u.s or north america where people typically see chess as a game for nerds my dad actually taught me how to play and then i won my first national tournament at eight years old my official title is women feed a master which means you have 2100 fide my national ranking in my country that i represent is almost 2300 which is above national master ranking [Music] women in chess is not something very common and it has taken us very long to get to the point where we're starting to change the stereotype that women are not genetically inferior to men at playing chess we believe that this situation will change i do not expect it to change to a proportion of being an equilibrium or or something like that but definitely it's going to change it it is not a short journey it's a long journey that will take some time [Music] back in college i really loved playing chess online and it was a hobby that i also missed doing in person so i started playing chess on chess.com and i really missed the social interaction so i just started streaming on twitch for fun and took off from there it was only a couple hundred viewers for the first two years or so that being said that was pretty significant in the chess category i was always one of the top three streamers at you know any point in my streaming career and i had a lot of early subscribers who really helped me out to even host cash tournaments and things like that so that actually ended up making streaming a viable career option very early on just because of how dedicated and tightly knit the chess community was and the generosity of these early donors i was working on a startup at the time when it ended up failing chess was already doing pretty well and it felt like enough for a full-time job so i decided to take the risk and see how far it would take [Music] me if i beat you what are you willing to do um what are you willing to do um we can do it for a dare sure sure well do you want to pick the dare beforehand let's just pick it after okay be fair give the person three options okay as a full-time twitch streamer my income comes from a lot of different sources part of it comes directly from viewers other parts come from sponsors we also just signed with team envy so now we get a salary from them as well we also have ad revenue from different social platforms and in the future we're going to be releasing merchandise she probably makes the similar type of income that the top professionals are from streaming chess on twitch and she's not even ranked in the top 20 000 players in the world so again the definition of what a chess professional is has changed with my first twitch stream i think like 60 of it was just people trying to flirt with me in chat or people just commenting on my appearance the entire time and nothing else they didn't care about the gameplay at all i actually stopped streaming at first because of that until i had moderators who were able to come and help clean it up it is hard to be a female gamer on twitch for a lot of reasons on one end you can sometimes gain followers faster on twitch but it doesn't translate to viewers which is what you usually monetize that being said there's also advantages because there's so many few females who actually make it usually females on twitch actually get paid more in terms of advertising dollars per average viewership than males because a lot of brands want to have diversity now while covid has obviously been a really tough time for most people and for myself included it's brought a lot of new attention to chess when the pandemic first hit in the first two months the amount of new users chess.com was getting every day doubled just from the impact and since i think it's been growing even more so it really helped explode the popularity of chess [Music] the queen's gambit's success was the dream of all chess enthusiasts i've talked with so many chess players and people in the chess business space and their question to me once i started building a chess following was what do we need to do to make chess more popular my answer was always well we we have to influence popular culture so obviously this had a huge impact on the amount of people interested in chess but also really on females who are interested in chess i mean the story of queen's gambit it's it's a story of uh a full success all over the way that is a bit of a fairy tale which almost doesn't happen or surely doesn't happen in such a scale when i thought about my chess career there weren't actually many points early on when i thought i could make a living through it back in high school at around 15 or 16 i opened up a facebook page and i would start to sell lessons online for something like 50 an hour to start just being able to get some kind of salary so i did have some success with that early on at least for a high schooler you know nothing crazy but i never imagined it would grow to this stage i'm happy that we have somebody like like alexander because it shows you once again that chess provides you a lot of uh opportunities you don't have to be even a grandmaster but you have to be you have to be you know an educated player because all the way through she explains and she is good enough to ready to explain the subtleties and so on so so it is a good story and i really like what i see and i think alexander would be a huge success for years to come it's just growing by the day whether that be youtube or twitch or other methods or selling courses on a website or whatever there are certainly thousands of people making a living in chess at this point at least to some extent with all of our channels income streams which includes me and my sister as well as my personal investments by the end of 2021 will definitely be at least in the mid six figures i realize that i'm prioritizing chess content over competitive chess these are two very different skills and if i want to become a 10 times bigger content creator then i have to learn specific skill sets that might not necessarily be studying more chess so my big goal for 2021 is to expand chess content to the average viewer and make it really relatable even for people who just like to play casually

Channel: CNBC Make It

Views: 940,746

Keywords: CNBC Make It, Make It, CNBC, How To Make It, Entrepreneurs, Starting A Small Business, Business Success, Small Businesses, Finance Tips, Career Tips, Work Hacks, Lifehacks, Money Management, Career Management, Managing Business, twitch streamer, chess live stream, MEET THE BOTEZ SISTERS!, team envy botez sisters, botezlive, botez sisters vs hikaru

Id: cylFdbgqkvQ

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021