Inside the mind of Hikaru Nakamura, the chess world No 2 whose streaming career comes first

Hikaru Nakamura did not wait around. After nearly five hours of moving chess pieces rapidly, he exited his computer chair and left the stage in London, realising he had lost in the Speed Chess Championships (SCC) semi-finals.

The Japan-born American was defeated in the semi-final and then the third-place match of chess.com’s SCC last weekend, in the tournament that was his main preparation for the Candidates, a competition which decides the next challenger to the Classical World Champion.

As the world’s No 2-ranked chess player and U.S. No 1, the expectations on Nakamura’s shoulders are high. They have been since he became America’s youngest grandmaster at 15 years old, beating Bobby Fischer’s 45-year record. But, as with any content creator, he is prone to online mockery.

Nakamura, 38, is the biggest streamer in chess, with two million followers on Twitch and three million on YouTube. The income he earns from content creation is more than enough to pay the bills, and means he does not rely on the inconsistent earnings of professional chess players.

And, in December 2025, Nakamura gained a new responsibility after he and his wife, the Iranian Woman Grandmaster Atousa Pourkashiyan, welcomed their first child.

How does this all fit in with his pursuit of becoming a world champion? What does he prioritise? And why is he one of chess’s most talked-about personalities? The Athletic spoke with Nakamura to discuss all this and more.

In videos, you get a sense for Nakamura the person, who otherwise feels wholly unrelatable based on his chess genius — which is evident from the way he calculates his decisions at least five moves ahead.

He cuts a simultaneously serious but carefree character, while showing a sense of humour with meme-style thumbnails on his YouTube channel. He has a popular series using the “Bongcloud” opening, one of the worst in chess, where the king is moved early.

Nakamura’s channel is remarkably open in terms of tactics. As well as playing online, he recaps his high-stakes tournament games with in-depth breakdowns of the opening structures and his decision-making process.

“The level I’m at, it doesn’t really have a disadvantage because I’ve played chess for so many years and, like tennis, it is repetition over and over like muscle memory. All the hours you spend studying don’t just vanish overnight,” Nakamura tells The Athletic.

“(But) if you spend too much time competing against much weaker competition, it can obviously affect your play. But for me, I can take a couple of weeks before a professional event and get ready. I avoid playing bad players, getting away from some bad habits, that’s the most important thing.

“For quite a few top players, if they were to try and do what I’m doing, they probably would fail miserably. They would likely do fine making content, but the level of their play would go down. So in that sense, even though I’m able to do it, I don’t think it applies to everyone.”

Attending the esports-style SCC in London, The Athletic saw exactly how Nakamura frustrates some chess fans but helps make new ones.

He reacted strongly at key moments, looking bewildered when dealing with connection issues and steaming off after losing.

After defeat in the semi-final to Iranian-French grandmaster Alireza Firouzja, 22, Nakamura uploaded a match recap to YouTube.

Following the loss, comments on chess.com’s SCC live stream called Nakamura “washed” and accused him of having “choked”, but others called it the best SCC match they had seen. It went for almost five hours and was decided by a tiebreaker.

The SCC has three different time controls in rapid and bullet chess, with players given five, three and one minutes for moves, and Nakamura, considered strong in these disciplines, has won five of the 10 editions.

“When I look at the match, I’m generally pretty happy because I maintained my level. Yes, you could say I lost my nerve at critical moments, but I would say that I really proved that I can still play in bullet (chess),” Nakamura said in his recap video.

He admitted his age can cause him to become more emotional about situations in games, and he can struggle to keep control of everything going on. The 35-year-old Magnus Carlsen, who has been the No 1 chess player since 2011, beat Firouzja in the final.

Both Carlsen and Nakamura are recent fathers. Nakamura grew up around chess — his older brother, Akusa, is a junior national champion. When he was a kid, he was coached by his stepfather, Sunil Weeramantry. Weeramantry is a FIDE Master, the third-highest title behind International Master and Grandmaster, awarded to players with an Elo rating of 2300 or higher by the International Chess Federation (FIDE).

His mother, Carolyn Merrow Nakamura, is a classically trained musician, and music is an example of an industry Nakamura would rather his newborn son pursue instead of chess.

“The answer (to whether I would want my son to pursue a chess career) unequivocally would be no,” Hikaru says.

“When I look at other fields like basketball, in the case of Michael Jordan, he had a couple of sons who played basketball. But when you’re so good in any field, the way I am, it’s very hard to have children that will live up to that, because what are the odds that I even get to No 2 in the world? They’re infinitely small. It’s such an anomaly, and to have children who can even get to a very high level, let alone the level I’ve gotten to, I think is not realistic.

“Chess is a very difficult career to pursue. You can’t take chess (ability) and go get a job (in the outside world).”

Nakamura is not done trying to defy the odds. He may have finished fourth at the SCC, but he has bigger fish to fry.

Looking to the Candidates Tournament, Nakamura is part of the eight-player competition which determines the challenger to the World Chess Championship. The 2026 edition will take place from March 26 to April 16 in Cyprus.

He qualified by achieving the highest average rating from August 2025 to January 2026 and competing in the required 40 FIDE tournament games. This route to qualification drew some criticism, as he played eligible Open tournaments, avoiding elite players and facing just one grandmaster on the road to the Candidates.

But he was runner-up in the previous edition of the tournament, his best finish, showing he will be a competitor on his fourth attempt.

At one point, he was losing motivation in his professional chess career after dropping as low as 20th in the world rankings and did not compete in an over-the-board competition for two years from 2019 to 2021, but the global pandemic helped change his perspective and bring back his love of the game.

A wildcard selection for the 2022 FIDE Grand Prix then helped his resurgence back to world No 2, which he first achieved in 2015 and returned to eight years later in 2023.

The Classical World Championship remains the most illustrious title in chess, even if the direction of the game is up for debate. Both Nakamura and Carlsen are proponents of faster formats and are signed to esports teams.

Nakamura is part of the Saudi Team Falcons, which he joined shortly before the 2025 Esports World Cup.

In 2017, he criticised FIDE’s decision to host the World Rapid & Blitz Championships in Saudi Arabia, saying on X, “to organize a chess tournament in a country where basic human rights aren’t valued is horrible. Chess is a game where all different sorts of people can come together, not a game in which people are divided because of their religion or origin”.

Asked for comment after the interview as to Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record and why he now represents Team Falcons after those comments, Nakamura said: “The Saudi regime has gone through many reforms in the past eight years, and the Esports World Cup is investing a lot into chess”.

As detailed by Amnesty International, in 2024 the European Union acknowledged there had been progress made on women’s rights in Saudi Arabia but raised “serious concerns” about a rise in executions and issues relating to civil and political rights.

The Saudi Arabia Amnesty International Report for 2024-25 highlights ongoing executions, possible migrant forced labour and violations of fair trial and due process rights, as well as a lack of freedom of expression.

Last year was the first time chess was part of the Esports World Cup, with 10-minute games and a $1.5million (£1.1m) prize fund on offer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Classical World Championship has a $2.5m purse.

“If you want fans to be excited, it doesn’t matter whether you play on a computer or in person. It has to be fast time controls. Because of the advancement of technology, the perfect game of chess is effectively a draw,” Nakamura says.

“If the top players have enough time, it’s very hard to win a game. The players will not make mistakes that are big enough to cause someone to win or lose. So I think that you really need to have these fast games.”

An increasing number of chess events are also catering to live audiences to grow fandom, and going against the tradition of silence to allow the players to concentrate.

At one such event in October, Checkmate: USA vs India in Arlington, Texas, with an audience of more than two thousand, fans were encouraged to make noise and cheer for the players.

“I definitely thrive off that environment. Maybe it’s just because I grew up in America. It felt to me that the Indian players felt uncomfortable and were scared to blunder,” Nakamura says.

In the event’s final game, Nakamura caught headlines by theatrically throwing reigning Classical world champion Gukesh Dommaraju’s king into the crowd after checkmating him. It was a WWE-esque manufactured moment that Nakamura was happy to participate in.

“I try to look at it very much from someone who barely knows how the pieces move and barely plays the game, rather than a grandmaster, and I think the only way you can make chess interesting is that there has to be more to it than just a game,” Nakamura says.

If anyone knows how to make a devoted chess audience, it is Nakamura. He first streamed his games in 2017, but his following received a massive boost thanks to the increased popularity of chess during Covid, following the release of Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit.

This means that, despite only one chess player being ranked above him in the world, he first and foremost considers himself a content creator.

In April, he could even become the chess world champion. But this is 2026, and the world feeds on content.

Nakamura does not see this cynically, but instead hopes to make a positive impact.

“There are so many people out there who are struggling day to day in life, and if you can give them even 30 minutes or an hour where they aren’t thinking about their problems and it’s something that they can just watch and enjoy, I feel in a sense you’ve made a difference,” he says.

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