GM Hikaru Nakamura and YouTuber GothamChess were blown away after IShowSpeed’s chess match against Manny Pacquiao broke a record.
YouTube sensation IShowSpeed has been traveling through Southeast Asia, and during his trip to the Philippines, he had a chance to spar with boxing legend Manny Pacquiao.
During his collab with the combat sports icon, the two also played a game of chess – and it happened to be the most-watched match of the year.
The game even piqued the interest of Chess pro Hikaru, who praised IShowSpeed as being an “extremely entertaining” player.
200k+ Watched a chess game between @ishowspeedsui VS @MannyPacquiao …WHAT???? pic.twitter.com/oDW6UNURVg
— Hikaru Nakamura (@GMHikaru) September 16, 2024
Hikaru explained that he’d heard stories of Pacquiao’s chess skills and wasn’t surprised that he was able to dominate IShowSpeed, but he was more in awe at just how many views the match had.
“They played in front of more than 250,000 people,” he said. “Now, to give you guys an example of how massive that is, when you look at the World Chess Championships or for example, the Chess Olympiad going on right now, the numbers of such pitiful events do not matter whatsoever. All anybody wants to see is celebrities playing chess, not these random Grandmasters who have wasted their entire lives.”
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
GothamChess, meanwhile, called the game the “most-watched chess match of 2024” and dubbed the collab “fascinating.”
According to chess stat-tracking site ChessWatch, the FIDE Candidates tournament had 337,656 peak viewers. However, those numbers were spread out over multiple channels, with Chess24 peaking at 141,708 currents. This is quite a difference from Speed and Pacquiao’s match, which had over 250,000 viewers from one channel.
As such, Speed’s stream is officially the most-watched chess match of 2024 when factoring in a single channel’s broadcast, which is quite the feat given the bizarre circumstances of the game even happening.
Interestingly, Pacquiao’s match with Speed has GothamChess eyeing his own team-up with the legendary boxer.
During his video, GothamChess urged the boxing icon to get in touch, saying he’d like to work together with him on a video project where he’d teach him boxing and in turn, the YouTuber would teach him some advanced chess strategies.