Reference:
What a lie.
If this is not a lie, then we are disqualified.
Please note the word āmembersā as Iām curious about chess servers having hundreds of millions registered players.
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Haha I thought about it too
Not hard to believe, we have 70 mil user accounts and chess is hugely more popular than Go. I wouldnāt be surprised if both chess dot com and lichess dot org have well over double our users, probably more.
Edit: bad memory, thatās 70 mil games. We only have 1.6 mil usersā¦ still would not be surprised to hear either or both of the chess sites being over 100, although that might include ghost accounts that played a game without registering.
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Iām talking about unique accounts who have some credibility concerning blitz games. Do we have this 1.6 mil?
1.6m is total accounts created. Many of them never played a game. I donāt know how to count all accounts who played a blitz game. Since OGS has problem of categorising some blitz games as live, maybe noone can knowā¦ possibly some api wizz can get total accounts with at least one blitz or live game, but that is not me.
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It seems to be very hazardous to get some consistent information. Just looking on our statistics, how many multiple accounts? How many empty ones which prove nothing? How many spams, advertising bots passing by?
āCan Go become an esport too?ā
About this precisely, I think we have the players and the prize money: this event would be another go tournament in the specific online blitz category.
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We donāt have the twitch viewers, which means we donāt have the ad potential. We wonāt be an esport. At least not any time soon.
Itās not about whether we could compete, itās about whether anyone would care.
Even chess barely holds a candle to CS and SC and LoL and other esports.
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Thatās things I completely agree. Now I 'm far to be sure thatās summerizing the situation as I am myself too āwestern analysisā focused, and still asthounished that a go pro world could still exist with hundreds of pros in some eastern part of the world (and big sponsorship).
On the side I 'm not myself THAT interested into blitz super player 
. Even watching a blitz game online gives me headache and lack of interest.
And even they are not doing well as e-sports, since it was a bit of a hype-bubble.
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The Korean Baduk League is maybe closest
Companies sponsoring teams of players
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Another elephant in the room we need to address is the effect of female influencers on pulling predominantly male viewers. For chess the Botez sisters, for Go we have players like ęé¹° and äæäæå.
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Except that itās played OTB and not online so not sure whether it can be considered an esport But yeah if changed to online then itās pretty close
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Is Joanne Missingham intentionally left out? 
Yeah as in, given the time controls, the sponsorships and teams, the commentary, itās basically already there minus the idea of it being an āe-sportā, as it being played online.
Itās probably not even necessarily better for viewers to have the game online, given how commentators on BadukTV can already analyse the board by displaying the analysis on the current board.
Unless playing electronically offered some technical advantages like pre-moving that led to even faster settings or something.
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Pre-moving is one, but another big advantage is taking many stones. If itās online players do not need to worry about the time needed to take all the dead stones no matter how many there are. (Of course they can pause when taking the stones but thatās like a minor interruption to the game.) Clicking the mouse is also much faster than placing the stone on the board and pressing the clock, so online play is much more suited for fast games.
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HJJ is less of a streamer and influencer herself. She has youtube channel, but she doesnāt directly interact with the viewers and live-stream (at least not in public channel), and more or less still keeps a more serious tone in the role as a āGo teacherā
Although no doubt she would have her pull and attracting viewers.
To be honest, those were by far the most ānot-telling-me-anything-at-all-linksā I ever clicked on
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Itās hard to link tiktok pages and probably you can just use their names (thatās why I didnāt translate them) to find them on tiktok. The best I can do is probably links their bilibili search, however, some would not be able to see them due to firewalls.
No problem @Counting_Zenist, I kind of get it. I googled the names and learned a bit more about them. Mainly thanks to google-translate though. Itās quite remarkable that thereās hardly any mention of either of them on non-Chinese / Asian websites.
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