ChessBase India hits 3 million subscribers on YouTube

by Sagar Shah - 26/07/2026

On 26th of July 2026, ChessBase India hit 3 million subscribers on their YouTube channel. In this article we tell you the stories of this channel through numbers! The channel is now 11 years old and has 19246 videos! A lot of people have contributed towards its success. After Gotham Chess, Hikaru Nakamura, ChessBase India becomes the third chess channel to hit 3 million subscribers.

3 million and counting: the ChessBase India YouTube story in numbers

Eleven years ago, on 23rd July 2015, we uploaded our first video - a young talent being interviewed in Thrissur, filmed by Priyadarshan Banjan on a trip that had nothing to do with a YouTube strategy.

The first ever video of the ChessBase India channel

Today that same channel has 3 million subscribers, 19,249 videos and 3.53 billion views. Here is what the numbers look like:

When we created the ChessBase India YouTube channel in 2015, YouTube was where we put things that would not fit into an article - a post-game interview, a shaky clip from the playing hall, a lesson that was easier shown than written.

Eleven years later, the channel has 3 million subscribers.

We crossed the mark this week, and rather than mark it with a thumbnail and move on, we went into the analytics and pulled out everything. Some of it we knew. A lot of it surprised us. All of it belongs to you more than it does to us.

Eleven years, counted properly

The total number of videos published on our channel are 19,249. Spread across 4,021 days, that is 4.8 videos every single day - including the days we were travelling, the days the venue had no internet, the days a tournament ran past midnight and the footage still had to be cut before the next round. Nobody sat down in 2015 and decided to do this. It happened one day at a time.

13,125 years of chess

The watch-time figure on ChessBase India is 11,50,57,777 hours. Divide it out and our viewers have collectively spent 13,125 years watching chess on this channel. Chess itself is around 1,500 years old! On long-form videos the average view duration is 3 minutes 38 seconds, And they are watching on a phone. 64.1% of all watch time comes from mobile, 20.4% from computers, and - the figure that has grown the most quietly - 10.9% from television screens. One in nine hours of ChessBase India is now playing in somebody's living room.

Made in India, watched everywhere

We named the channel ChessBase India, and India has more than shown up: 2,33,09,01,287 views, 65.7% of the total. But the other third is the story we did not expect. 1.21 billion views - one in every three - come from outside India.

Viewers in the United States, Indonesia, Germany and the Philippines each watch for about three minutes a video - longer than the Indian average of 1:51. The chess is the same in every language; it turns out the commentary travels too.

Seven in ten of you are under 35

The audience breakdown says something about Indian chess that no rating list can:

33.5% are aged 18–24
29.7% are aged 25–34
6.3% are 13–17
73.4% male, 26.4% female

Nearly 70% of our viewers are under 35. This is a young audience that found chess through a screen, and it is the clearest evidence we have of what the last decade has done to the sport in this country.

The videos that did it

Five videos account for over 270 million views between them:

Praggnanandhaa vs Ganguly - 86 million
The shortest game of Magnus Carlsen - 77 million
Rematch: Vishy Anand vs Praggnanandhaa - 63 million
Nakamura cannot believe he could... - 27 million
Magnus Carlsen arrives 2:30 mins late - 20 million

And how do people find them? 61.8% from browse features - the YouTube home page - with 16.2% from suggested videos and 11.1% from search. Most of you did not go looking for us. Chess was placed in front of you, and you stayed.

The loudest day

On Thursday, 9th January 2025, the channel recorded 4,98,86,608 views in twenty-four hours.

That is nearly 5 crore views in a single day!

Thank you

Three million is a strange number to celebrate, because it is not really a number. It is 30 lakh individual decisions to press a button, most of them made by people we will never meet. Some of you have been here since the days of 10,000 subscribers, when Pragg vs Ganguly went viral and we could not understand what was happening to the analytics page. Some of you arrived last week through a Short. It makes no difference to us. You are the reason a small chess media house in India can cover tournaments all across the world.

The entire ChessBase India team deserves credit for what we have achieved. Not everyone works on the channel - maybe 1/3 of the above members work on the YouTube channel per se. However, it all adds up. It's a team effort. It's a joint effort.

GM Harshit Raja, India's 69th GM has been one of the most loved personalities on the channel. His commentary has been extra ordinary and his positive vibe has attracted so many people to the game.

Since the start of 2026 IM Soumya Swaminathan has been a regular commentator on her channel and has had such a wonderful influence with her positive energy!

ChessBase India's success belongs to thousands of people. It is difficult to thank everyone because so many factors have to come together to make things to keep a channel going. We want to thank those who gave us interviews, who took out the time from their busy schedules and trusted us. Thank you to FIDE and the countless organisers who let us into their playing halls.

Thank you to our team members Abhyudaya Ram, Himank Ghosh, Ravindra Potawad, Tushar Damor, Ayush Jain, Niklesh Jain, Anmol Bhargav, Vivek Sohani (Director saab) from the team who cut, shoot, wrote and uploaded through the night so that a round finishing at 11 p.m. is on the channel by 1 a.m.

None of this would have been possible without ChessBase believing in us in 2015. Heartfelt gratitude to Frederic Friedel and family, Matthias Wuellenweber and Rainer Woisin and the entire ChessBase team who has been always very kind to us.

We want to thank some incredible people who have been amazing friends, supporters and advisors on this journey - Priyanka Ved, Nithin Chandan, Karishma Daftary, Ajinkya Kurdukar, Shikhar Saxena, Charmie Kapoor, Dharmen Shah, Siddharth Bulia,

There are two people who created special apps for the ChessBase India channel - Rakshit Singh with the bars and Keith Mascarenhas with the chat chess moves. Both of them we have used extensively to grow the channel. Both of them helped us as a part of the community and never expected anything in return!

ChessBase India's past team members who have contributed immensely are Shahid Ahmed, Aditya Sur Roy, Rupali Mullick, Priyadarshan Banjan. You all are doing different things now, but your contribution is extremely valued. We also want to thank people who have contributed at different points of time to ChessBase India's journey V. Saravanan, Saji Matthews, Prajwal Bhat, Asim Khan, Harshil Jhaveri, Shitij Seth.

We thank the members of our community and friends who have opened their homes to us during coverage - Suraj and Ankita in London, Sachin and Swapnali in New York and our dear friends Magesh Chandran and Anuprita Patil in North Carolina, USA.

Nodwin Gaming has helped us immensely in our coverage of top events by partnering with us and a big shoutout to our sponsors - Ambit, Duolingo, Neuro, Wildr. We want to thank our YouTube members who have contributed to the growth of the channel. Many of them have been members for over 5 years now! We have mentioned each one of these members here.

A big thank you to the top players whom we have covered over the years - Magnus Carlsen (1062 videos), D. Gukesh (876 videos) Praggnanandhaa (832 videos), Arjun Erigaisi (653 videos), Vishy Anand (601 videos), Vidit Gujrathi (592 videos) Anish Giri (433 videos), Nihal Sarin (418 videos), Hikaru Nakamura (364 videos) R. Vaishali (196 videos), Divya Deshmukh (188 videos). We have close to 1000 playlists and all of them can be found here.

Our motto has not changed since 2015: Powering chess in India and the world. There are 19,249 videos of evidence, and we are not close to done. See you at four million.

Last but not the least a huge shoutout to the standup comedians who made our channel popular thanks to their presence - Samay Raina, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Vaibhav Sethia.