Belgium has 100,000 active chess players on Chess.com

By Lukas Dewijngaert, e-sports & community manager – FRBE-KBSB-KSB

In January 2026, Belgium surpassed the milestone of 100,000 active monthly players on Chess.com for the first time. This figure was confirmed in February: 100,973 unique Belgian users played at least one game. By comparison, there were barely 4,000 at the end of 2019.

2020: lockdown and The Queen’s Gambit

Before 2020, online chess in Belgium was a niche activity. There were approximately 4,000 players per month, a fraction of the current number. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that. When clubs closed their doors and tournaments were cancelled, chess moved to the screen. By the summer of 2020, there were around 6,700 active Belgian players on Chess.com, an increase of over 50%.

However, the real explosion occurred in the autumn. In October 2020, The Queen’s Gambit was released on Netflix. The effect was immediate: in November, the number of active players doubled from 6,800 to nearly 13,000. By March 2021, there were already more than 25,000. In a single year, Belgium went from 4,000 to 25,000 active online chess players, a sixteenfold increase.

COVID opened the door; The Queen’s Gambit kicked it wide open.

2022–2023: the Niemann effect and a second boom

After the Queen’s Gambit peak, the number of active players subsided, but it stabilized at around 19,000 to 21,000—five times higher than before the pandemic. The new baseline had been established.

In September 2022, the Hans Niemann scandal triggered the next wave. When Magnus Carlsen publicly accused the young American Grandmaster of cheating, chess suddenly became front-page news. The story reached an audience that normally never encounters chess. Belgian activity on Chess.com began to rise again: from 23,000 in August to 27,000 in September, 40,000 in December, and in January 2023, it surged to nearly 59,000.

The peak followed in March 2023: 69,296 active Belgian players in a single month. In barely six months, the number had tripled.

2024–2026: consolidation and the road to 100,000

Following the Niemann peak in early 2023, activity settled back to approximately 46,000 to 48,000 players by the summer of 2024. While this was a decrease, it was still more than double the pre-Niemann level. Previous peaks were always linked to a single major media moment. What happened next was different.

From September 2024, the number of active players began to rise month after month without a single clear catalyst. No Netflix series, no scandal, no pandemic. Just steady, uninterrupted growth: 54,000 in September, 67,000 in December, 86,000 in February 2025, and 99,140 by May 2025. In a year and a half, the number of active players doubled: from 46,000 to more than 100,000.

In January 2026, the milestone was officially reached: 100,351 active players. February confirmed this trend with 100,973.

What stands out in the data is a clear seasonal pattern: activity decreases every summer and peaks every winter. However, the winter peaks are getting higher year after year: 52,000 in December 2023, 67,000 in December 2024, and 93,000 in December 2025. Chess in Belgium is not growing in leaps, but structurally.

The data

The figures in this article are based on a comprehensive analysis of all Belgian Chess.com accounts. Using the official Chess.com API, 243,049 user profiles with a Belgian flag were collected. For each profile, it was determined in which months the user played at least one game. This provides a complete monthly overview of Belgian activity on the platform from 2007 to the present day.

What does this mean?

100,000 active players per month is more than the membership of most Belgian sports federations. It demonstrates that chess in Belgium no longer exists solely in clubs, but also on the screen. Each peak brought a new generation of players to the platform, and a large proportion of them stayed.

The challenge for the chess community now is to reach those online players. Those playing their first games on Chess.com today could be walking through the doors of a chess club tomorrow.