Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when my 14-year-old son, who had never expressed any interest in it before, suddenly told me he was adamant about playing chess against me.
He does have a long history of playing Fortnite, Minecraft, Overwatch and even Grand Theft Auto. He bought himself a gaming chair. When he was eleven, he bought a streaming microphone and for his bar mitzvah, he pampered himself with a gaming computer.
And two months ago, on just another random evening, my son emerges from his room and says he wants to play chess. The game of Kings was been around for 1,500 years. Why now? I actually found this concerning.
Upon entering his room, I could see his web browser was open to chess.com, The new mecca of online gaming.
Fast forward 15 minutes later, and my chess pieces are down for the count. Let me tell you, this child can play and play really well!
He's been practicing against the finest computerized bots, and while we were playing, he lambasted me with chess terms such as Fork, London opening, King's pawn and many others I'd never heard before. He destroyed me in 10 minutes without saying a word.
"What's happening lately is an actual revolution with junior high children and sometimes even younger, who are not leaving the online gaming world, but simply shifting to chess," says Dan Drory, a 43-year-old manager of a central Israeli Chess Club.
"This online gaming world combined, with Youtubers, streamers and discord gamers have contributed to the resurgence of the popularity of chess. There was a time when you weren't part of the 'in' crowd if you didn't play Fortnite.
"Now it's the same with chess. When I try to ask these kids how they even got into chess in the first place, they tell me 'Well, everyone's doing it', and I can also see the growth in my club.
"Groups are absolutely packed to capacity with new players. We can no longer accept new kids because there are so many of them already. Chess was once considered the game for nerds. But now it's the cool game every kid wants to play."
Within the last year, chess has suddenly become a very lucrative industry. The website chess.com has doubled its number of users between October 2020 and April 2022 and currently stands at 100,000,000 users with servers often crashing.
"The online gaming world took a 1,500-year-old game and made it technologically accessible in a way that's truly amazing," Drory says.
"During COVID a lot of people in their 20s suddenly became involved in chess, and now there's another wave of 13-year-olds. Kids are catching up pretty quickly because they have access to their smartphones."
Founder and CEO of chess com, Erik Allebest, attests that the recent wave of new users is mostly made up of junior high and high school kids. Speaking to the Washington Post, he told them that his own son, who is 15, became a game fanatic.
But not because it's dad's job, but because he was watching his online chess hero, Levy Rozman, more commonly known as "Gotham Chess".
He's a 27-year-old Youtuber from Brooklyn, and is a certified chess GrandMaster.
Sporting a geeky look with glasses and all, you'd never have heard of him if he hadn't transformed himself, with untold charisma, into the world's most prominent chess streamer.
The one element that defines modern-day chess, in terms of its online presence, is speed. Kids are playing a much faster game than those of previous generations, so the element of strategy and long-term thinking may be slightly diminished, but the excitement they generate from playing is greatly enhanced.
Another prominent chess streamer is 35-year-old Hikaru Nakamura, who plays chess with the speed of a bullet. He has won all five of the most recent speed chess championships on chess.com, and routinely speaks to his viewers while he's playing.
While his Youtube channel only had 78,000 subscribers in early 2020, Today that number stands at around 1,500,000. "There is no other sport in the world in which a top-five contender can speak to you and explain exactly what he's doing while he's doing it. In chess, it's very educational, very professional and very entertaining," explains Drory.
Some hypothesized that the recent resurgence of chess when it comes to Youtube has to do with the site's own algorithm. Chess is a very non-violent, non-political game, so the algorithm favors it.
An American chess teacher recently said that one of the most engaging things about being a teacher right now, is that chess became a sort of youth epidemic.
"Actually, we've recently discussed how to stop children from playing too much chess in teachers' conferences, which is kind of like thinking how you need to stop them from reading for fun.
"When I was in high school, chess was simply for nerds, but now it breaks any cultural, social or linguistic barrier there is."
And Israel is coming into the fold. Romy Snyder, a high school student from the city of Petah Tikva Began playing online chess after watching The Queen's Gambit on Netflix.
"Everyone in my school Suddenly became obsessed with chess, and sometimes the teachers have to tell them to stop playing during other lessons. I think that pretty much every boy in my class plays chess right now, but almost none of the girls do."
That trend holds up internationally as well. In the competitive chess world, the ratio stands at around 50 Men grandmasters to every female grandmaster.
On Youtube, though, you'd be able to find Alexandra and Andrea Botez, American-Canadian chess sisters, that set up their own Youtube and Twitch channels with millions of subscribers.
Still, the professional chess community, which is mostly male-dominated, refers to this new female presence with some admiration, distilled with a certain amount of dismissal.
"The Botez sisters are not particularly good chess players, but they are beautiful," Drory says. "They know how to create engaging content. And they are showing everyone that you can be a beautiful young girl who loves chess, and a lot of people who watch online chess find that to be very engaging."
According to Yaniv Berkovich, a junior high student from central Israel, "Chess is considered to be a very slow and often boring game, but the online community has been able to adapt it and elevate its tempo in a way that interests people.
"I used to play a lot of Fortnite, Minecraft and all those usual games, and then I reverted to chess. Initially, I was alone. I was simply bored during COVID and I wanted to do something to engage myself.
"Today, around half the boys in my class are online chess players. There used to be a point where I never even told people that I play chess, but today I have no problem saying it, because everyone's doing it anyway.
"In class, nobody dares to play against me because I'm by far the best, but in order to even the odds, I sometimes begin playing without a queen."
The Israeli Chess Association says 1,500 classes nationwide have already instilled chess into their official curriculum, and now the government is getting in on it as well, officially recognizing chess as a sport. Chess is coming across as an excellent way to. Develop. A child's thinking prowess, creativity, as well as the principle of fair play, and also turns out to be an excellent way to overcome attention deficit disorders.
But it's not all fun and games, according to the coach Drory. "My job is to encourage kids to transfer their online experiences into the real world, and that's where the actual work begins.
"Chess teaches you proper patterns and a gradual process of thinking, and in the online community, much of that aspect of playing chess is diminished. It's important for kids to understand that this is a mental adjustment.
"If in Judo, for example, a fight can end in five minutes, a game of chess could take hours and sometimes even days, and that is not something that kids find it very easy to handle."
Meanwhile, in my living room, emotions go unchecked, and my Kid is kicking my ass all over the place while trash-talking me. When the game is over, he warmly shakes my hand and puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. Now I'm the kid.