The women who are bringing chess into the 21st century – with bullet matches and viral videos
Olga SawczukBBC World Service
BBC
During Covid, Nemo Zhou “was losing [her] mind” locked at home and thought it would be nice to earn some money.
So she started streaming chess – and it’s now become a career.
A female grandmaster – the highest chess title reserved for women – Zhou was pursuing economics and mathematics at the University of Toronto at the time.
She launched her own broadcast in 2020, after first making appearances on a friend’s channel, and the timing was impeccable.
A few months later, the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit was released. Along with the pandemic, this has led to a boom in chess.
Zhou’s channel quickly took off. Sensing the boom was here to stay, she dropped out of college to focus on her new career.
“You really have to put yourself forward”
Five years later, Zhou, now 26, has more than two million followers across Twitch, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
It broadcasts five to six hours a day, at least five days a week, attracting its largest audience on weekends.
Her videos feature a mix of her playing online and in person, including against the famous hustlers in New York’s Washington Square Park.
Zhou also benefits from commercial sponsorships, works with other collaborators and frequently travels around the world.
On YouTube, she makes money from views, advertising, and brand deals – and on Instagram, her income comes from sponsored posts.
On Twitch, she makes money through subscriptions, which start at around $5 (£3.70) per month in the US, and through donations called “bits”, the platform’s in-app currency.
Dr Nina Willment, a research associate at the University of York, estimates that a content creator with Zhou’s following could comfortably earn a combined six-figure salary across all platforms.
But she emphasizes that this is only a rough estimate, as few streamers disclose their earnings.
Zhou would not comment on how much she earns.
Willment also notes that Zhou’s more than two million followers across all platforms place her in the top 1-2% of content creators in the world.
Courtesy of Nemo Zhou via Twitch
“We needed a little makeover”
Chess content creators like Zhou are among those helping to bring the ancient game into the 21st century.
Elite chess was once played almost exclusively in quiet rooms with games lasting hours and little effort made to engage casual spectators, but this is changing.
Increasingly, major tournaments have “quick” and “blitz” time limits, with as little as three minutes per player per match, while heart rate monitors are attached to players to show the stress they are under during critical moments.
Last year, chess made its debut at the Esports World Cup, one of the world’s largest competitive gaming events, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This year, chess returns with even more participants.
All this is helping to shake the image of chess as “an old man’s game”, says international master Fiona Steil-Antoni, who works as a commentator and interviewer at international tournaments.
“I think we needed a little makeover,” she says, “and we’re definitely achieving that.”
You can watch our video report on the women who are changing the image of chess on YouTube
“I never stopped thinking about content creation”
One of those following in the footsteps of streamers like Zhou is Sarah El Barbry.
The 24-year-old, of Egyptian and Moroccan parents but who grew up in Paris, has been creating chess content on TikTok since 2023, but became a streamer last year when she noticed a lack of women broadcasting in French.
Its production features a mix of online chess games, educational content and in-person challenges such as playing blindfold, where players visualize the board in their heads.
In November last year, a video made by El Barbry showing her starting a game of chess with just a king and queen and making checkmate went viral, gaining 28 million views and gaining her an additional 10,000 subscribers.
She now has over 75,000 subscribers across all platforms.
“Since I started, I never stopped thinking about content creation. I sometimes work nights from midnight to 3 a.m..”
But while creating content about failure can be lucrative for those who succeed, there is no guarantee of success.
At first, El Barbry earned just $117 (£87) a month from streaming, before expanding to YouTube.
Today she earns around $1,700 (£1,300) a month, but this remains below the French minimum wage.
As El Barbry’s revenue grows, Willment says the success of streamers who have built audiences “overshadows” the fact that “thousands, if not millions of people” aren’t making anything trying to break through.
“I know I have more viewers because I’m a girl”
As of January 2026, female-led channels accounted for about half of the 20 most-watched chess streams on Twitch, excluding large corporate channels, according to Twitchmetrics, an online platform that tracks viewer engagement on Twitch.
But most chess content creators, as well as their audiences, are men.
El Barbry estimates that her audience across all platforms was 95% men when she started and is now around 85%.
She believes she attracts more viewers than some male streamers because she is a woman. “I’m OK with that because, you know, it’s part of the game.”
Zhou says his YouTube audience is about 80 percent male, but his Instagram chess page is split 50-50, “which is pretty crazy and pretty cool.”
Women at the top of the game
There is evidence that the chess boom is attracting more women and girls to play competitively.
The proportion of players registered with the world chess federation Fide for “standard” time control – under which most competitive games take place – increased from 10% in 2020 to 16.5% in 2026.
However, the elite remains more than ever dominated by men.
There are currently no women among the top 100 players and only three women have achieved this feat in history.
Studies suggest that the performance gap between men and women can be explained by a number of factors, including lower participation rates, a lack of female coaches, and playing environments that girls and women often find hostile.
The participation gaps are much smaller in countries where chess is taught in primary schools, such as in Mongolia, where almost 40% of players registered with Fide are women, 35% in Sri Lanka and 30% in Uganda.
Steil-Antoni believes things are changing for the better, adding that she is “cautiously optimistic” that gaming will move closer to “some kind of equality in my life.”
Sygma via Getty Images
“It will be all or nothing”
Zhou now has ambitions beyond chess.
She branched out into lifestyle, travel and fashion content, and in October, she participated in Paris Fashion Week.
She now hopes to sign with a modeling agency and reach a million followers on her Instagram chess page.
El Barbry, for her part, is determined to give herself six months to break through as a streamer.
Otherwise, his backup plan is a career in the corporate world, after earning a civil engineering degree and a master’s degree in business management.
In January, she made her first appearance as a commentator at a major esports event.
She says the last few months have been an “adventure.”
“I feel like this year is going to be crazy. It’s going to be all or nothing.”
This is part of the BBC World Service’s Global Women series, sharing new and important stories from around the world.
