Making a Living in Chess: The Challenges
Austrian chess Grandmaster, Felix Blohberger, posted a 26-minute video on YouTube titled “Being a Chess Professional (in Europe) sucks.“
The 22-year-old gave his raw and vulnerable take on the struggles of a chess professional in making a sustainable living, touching upon many persisting problems in the ecosystem and also suggesting ways to possibly make it better for other chess professionals like him. Felix himself is an active chess player with a standard rating of 2533 which is close to his peak. He is the 5th highest-rated player in his country. Felix mentioned that the video was relevant to any Grandmaster who is not a part of the top 20-30 players. Top chess player turned streamer, Hikaru Nakamura has said the same thing on numerous occasions that only the top 20 to 30 players are able to make a living purely by playing chess.
Felix talked about how being a chess professional in Europe is different from being a chess professional in Asia, comparing the standard of living of the two regions, and how living in Asia is much cheaper relatively – a certain sum of prize money is much more valuable to an Indian player as compared to a European player. He also talked about the underwhelming recognition that chess gets in their continent giving an example of how the young Uzbek Team was decorated with huge rewards by the Government of Uzbekistan after they won a Gold Medal in the Chennai Olympiad 2022. Felix compared that felicitation to the case of one of his close friends who won an Individual Board prize in the 2024 Budapest Olympiad. Felix’s friend, however, “got absolutely nothing, not even a handshake, just absolutely nothing. No one said anything and the world just kept on going like it was before the event” in the words of Felix. He pointed out the reason countries like India and Uzbekistan are yielding so many prodigies – the recognition that acts as motivation for the players.
Felix said that about 90% of the Grandmasters turn to coaching in order to be able to sustain a career in the sport. He believes that the Coaching Market in chess is also flawed since it is undervalued in Europe. He compared the fee of coaching sessions with a Grandmaster in Eastern Europe to that of the United States and told how absurdly cheap it is in Eastern European countries like Russia – 80 Dollars to 30 Euros. This disables a coach living in a central European country to compete with Russia, where 30 Euros are supposedly worth more than in, say, Austria.
Felix Blohberger also blatantly revealed the earnings he made in 2024, a sum of about 30,000 Euros, a third to half of which came from playing chess tournaments. He mentioned how it would not be sustainable if he didn’t do coaching or made courses. Felix believes that content creation is by far the best way to make a living through chess.
It’s not the first time that a Grandmaster has opened up on such a topic. A few months ago, top Dutch player Jorden van Foreest and Azeri Grandmaster Durarbayli Vasif went vocal about the stagnant prize funds in open tournaments. They believed that the financial conditions for, even players in the top 50-100, have worsened over the last few years.
The situation seems to not have improved since. One of the major ways suggested by Felix to improve the situation for chess playing professionals was to market the sport differently, making it more viewer friendly by promoting Rapid and Blitz more, etc. All of these ideas have been around for a while but not acted upon yet. Online chess platforms are continuously coming up with exciting shorter format tournaments every now and then, but abundant obstacles appear on that road too, one being fair play.
To watch the full video of GM Felix Blohberger, click here, and follow Chess Ninja for more such stories
