When you need a couple of on-camera ambassadors for the game of chess, you won’t do better than the Botez sisters. Alexandra, 29, and Andrea, 23, have been playing since they were barely out of kindergarten, and with a combined 3 million followers across their Twitch and YouTube channels, they have capably demonstrated that in at least one respect, chess is like any other sport: personality matters.
Yes, the Los Angeles-based pair have impressive ratings with the International Chess Federation (FIDE), and Alexandra, who holds a master title, has represented Canada at the organization’s Women’s Chess Olympiads. But there is nothing elitist or intimidating in the Botezes’ daily chess content, which has drawn together a community of enthusiasts with an appealingly chaotic mix of sibling banter, silliness, and self-deprecation. One recent stream clip, for instance, found Andrea trying to win an online match as Alexandra roasted her for being single for longer than it took to earn a college degree. (Meanwhile, their roommate danced in the background.) In another video, the Botezes grilled their friend, the Norwegian chess grandmaster and five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, about why he hadn’t invited them to his wedding.
Starting April 29 on Twitch, the Botez sisters will serve as commentators for the sixth edition of PogChamps, Chess.com’s series of amateur tournaments featuring a variety of internet celebrities and athletes. It’s a perfect showcase for their irreverent style: “You don’t have to take chess super seriously to enjoy it,” Alexandra tells Rolling Stone. “Which is also kind of the spirit of PogChamps, even though everyone will be very competitive about it.” A dozen competitors, including professional soccer player Eberechi Eze, Fortnite streamer Mongraal, YouTube adventurer Inoxtag, and popular VTuber Filian will compete for a $100,000 prize — and, of course, bragging rights.
Here, the Botezes talk about spreading the gospel of their favorite game, why they love hosting PogChamps matches, and how tired they are of hearing about The Queen’s Gambit.
We have sixth PogChamps coming up. You’ve been with it since the beginning. How has it changed and grown over time?
Andrea: You could say that a lot of the competitors have gotten really strong, to the point where some of them can’t even compete anymore.
Alexandra: Yeah, we can’t invite them. They’ve gotten too good at chess.
Andrea: Like Tyler1, a huge competitive streamer on Twitch, he was in last PogChamps. He was a huge fan favorite, played chess every day for months, and now he’s almost my rating online.
Alexandra: In rapid, it doesn’t count.
Andrea: But hey, gotta give him some points. And there’s a lot of other creators who were huge fan favorites and just can’t compete anymore because they got so addicted to chess after the event.
So it really is a gateway drug for some people. If I ever compete, I’ll just stay stupid.
Alexandra: Just pretend you’re the same, exactly.
What’s what’s really exciting about an amateur tournament compared to a professional one? I see Chess.com is advertising “the highest average of blunders per game anyone has ever seen in an event of this magnitude.”
Alexandra: It makes it more accessible for the audience. It seems like, “Oh, if they can get this good at chess so quickly, so can I.” It’s also more relatable when you’re seeing the kinds of mistakes people make. It’s okay to sort of joke, or have higher level players commentating, like, “Oh, he probably shouldn’t be hanging his queen here.” So it turns it into something more lighthearted than these really high level tournaments.
Andrea: The audience for a tournament like this is always going to be larger than top grand masters playing, just because obviously a greater amount of population can understand what’s going on.
What’s the fastest way to improve your game?
Alexandra: When you’re starting, so much of it is if you’re actually willing to study. Because most people just don’t study. It’s that easy. Like, if you put in any time reviewing your games or doing puzzles, you’re going to get better really quickly.
Andrea: For beginners specifically, I would say just doing puzzles, since the number one reason they’re losing games is because they blunder [make a critical mistake]. So I’ve seen a lot of my friends who train for PogChamps jump 100 Elo [ratings] not even by playing a ton of blitz, just by doing Puzzle Rush [a Chess.com practice feature] every day.
Who are you looking forward to watching this time around?
Andrea: I’m excited to see Lydia Violet. We’re actually coaching her. It’s harder to get female streamers who are interested in event like this, just because of the nature of the game. Lydia is a huge breakout female streamer of the year. She has a lot of diverse streams, like debates and other things. And obviously she’s really good at gaming as well.
Did you have any controversies in the last PogChamps?
Andrea: There was a big rivalry between xQc and Tyler1, because they’re known for always going against each other, especially in gaming. So their chess match was particularly exciting.
Alexandra: And at some point, xQc was playing his game from an airplane, and he kept losing because his Wi-Fi was going in and out. I don’t remember how that game ended. [Editor’s Note: His opponent won based on time.]
You mentioned bringing a woman streamer into the tournament. I take it you want to not only be ambassadors for chess, but make it more inclusive.
Alexandra: It’s important to have female representation and make sure they feel comfortable once they are there. PogChamps does a really good job at this, honestly, and it’s also virtual. A lot of the things that women usually experience in chess tournaments is because everything is in person and, you know, let’s say 99 percent of people there are good actors. It only takes, like, one weirdo who’s following the woman around or something like that to make her feel unsafe. But at least online, it’s harder for that to happen.
Andrea: There’s so many great female commentators: Anna Cramling, Dina [Belenkaya] — that’s already four female chess players who are commentating, who I personally find extremely entertaining as well.
Alexandra: Although, I will say the problem with that is like, if something goes wrong, and it’s mostly females commentating, they get blamed for it. If the viewership is not as good, people will be like, “You shouldn’t have brought on the female commentators.”
What do you try to bring to your commentating style?
Alexandra: I don’t want to go five moves deep, because you just lose the audience. We want to make people understand what’s going on with the chess without getting deep in the weeds to the point where you lose them.
Andrea: The parts that I enjoy about streaming are cracking jokes and being able to go back and forth with the chat. I’m only a 2000 [rating], so an expert. I like getting paired with a grandmaster. They can obviously explain the position much better, but when it comes to bringing a more personal aspect, that’s what I do best.
Speaking of personal — how many hours of chess do you play a week?
Alexandra: If we’re playing a tournament now, then we’ll play maybe eight hours of chess a day, at least for, say, 10 days. But if we’re at home, I’d say now we’re primarily content creators, where we spend a lot of time trying to innovate, even going beyond chess and some of the things we work on. But when I started streaming, I would do eight hours of chess, six to seven days a week.
How are you breaking out of that routine?
Alexandra: We just partnered with Freestyle Chess. They’re trying to bring this new format that randomizes the starting position of the pieces, and a lot of top players really like this, because engines [chess computer models] have taken a lot of the creativity away from tournaments — people just prepare the first moves with an engine. So whenever we go there, we film with all the top players, and we spend the weeks leading up to it crafting good thumbnails, titles, story lines and ways to try to show the players beyond just playing chess with them. One video we recently did: Magnus recently got married to Ella [Mallone], and we’re working on a video where it’s like, who knows each other better: me and my sister, or Magnus and Ella? We’re trying to get the personalities. People care way more about the game when they care about the person who’s playing.
Andrea: We’ve also launched a podcast [called Not a Podcast]. All of this happened because of Freestyle, because they’re encouraging creators to come where in where before, a couple years ago, it would be really hard for a content creator, basically impossible, to get ever land an interview with Magnus, because they’re so focused on competitive chess, they’re not going to prioritize content and media. But people have realized that that also helps grow the game and gets more eyes following the tournaments as well. There’s a lot of intrigue in the top players, but there’s very few personal outlets where they get to share their personality outside of being a competitive chess player. We also bring on non-chess guests, but it’s been really popular with the chess community.
You mentioned chess engines, and I was reminded of the Hans Niemann scandal. Niemann, a grandmaster, beat Carlsen in an upset in a 2022 match, leading Carlsen to withdraw from the tournament and setting off wild speculation about whether Niemann could have cheated, though no such allegations were ever proven. I wonder what you make of the state of AI and those issues in today’s climate.
Alexandra: They’ve really upped the security for a lot of these in-person events. Magnus went on [The Joe Rogan Experience], and he was explaining how, if he cheated, it would be really hard for him to get caught because he needs so little assistance. It could be as little as an arbiter slightly scratching their his nose when he has a winning tactic, and nobody would know. So I think it is going to get increasingly difficult, but I do think part of it does come to player integrity, and as technology advances, hopefully anti-cheating measures are also going to advance.
How competitive are you two as siblings?
Alexandra: We’re competitive when it comes to things like games, but one thing the internet really tries to do is pit us against each other, constant comparisons and things like that. We’ve actually become really supportive and really see each other’s wins as our own. It takes a lot of conscious effort from both of us to get there. But if we play chess, I’ll trash talk the shit out of her, don’t get me wrong. When it comes to real stuff, I see us more as a team.
Andrea: When we’re when we’re streaming, we get to be more of our playful sibling dynamic. But in reality, we try to work together on every single project, because that’s really our edge .
Alexandra: And we get in fights a lot. But one thing I told Andrea is, “Yeah, but who would you rather work with than me? Things might be challenging, but it’s not going to get better than this.
Can you tell me about the Botez Gambit, the chess move you’re famous for?
Alexandra: When I started streaming, I would blunder my queen a lot, and somebody actually tracked it, and they tracked it for both me and Andrea. And for our Elo [ratings], we blunder our queen way more than we should. I have no idea why that happened. So then we sort of just turned it into a joke and called it the Botez Gambit, because gambits usually imply that you get some compensation. It sort of captures the more casual vibes we have to our stream. Like, it’s okay if you make mistakes, it’s okay to make fun of yourself as you do it.
Alexandra, you play a good amount of poker now, too. How has that experience been different for you?
Alexandra: It’s one of the things for me, whether it’s competitive chess or competitive poker, when I start competing, I only want to do that, because I know what it takes to get really good at a game. So I think the hardest part about it is splitting our time between so many different things. That being said, poker is the first game I’ve loved as much as chess, and I’m really grateful to have that, and it’s going to be a game I play for the rest of my life.
You’ve got a ton of fans. I’m curious about the comments and stories you hear from them that make you feel like that’s why you’re in the game. And what are the most annoying things they do?
Alexandra: The most annoying question is, “Have you seen The Queen’s Gambit?” We used to have this bit where we were like, “Wait, they made a movie about women playing chess? This is huge for us! We’ve got to watch it!” But then we stopped trolling. But no, I think it’s always extremely meaningful when somebody comes up to you and says, “You’re the reason why I started playing chess,” or “My daughter looks up to you guys,” and that’s why I think chess is a really special game that has a lot of benefits, even if you’re not somebody who’s playing it competitively. Especially in 2025, when everybody has really shortened attention spans, I think it could really help with logic and focus.
Is there a particular opening or move that either of you is really into you right now?
Alexandra: Andrea loves the London.
Andrea: Everyone knows that I only play the London System [a strategy for the white side of the board that opens with the queen’s pawn], which has been a fatal weakness at tournaments. However, with freestyle chess, it’s not really a problem, so I’m never going to change.
Do you have any particular chess goals for 2025?
Andrea: To be completely honest, we are not planning on playing competitive chess. We’re really focused on branching out our YouTube and going more outside of the chess niche.
Alexandra: I would personally love to play more competitive chess, because last year we went back to classical chess, and I got some of the best results I’ve ever had, even though I had come out of retirement. Right now in the U.S., my rating is really close to national master — I have a female title, which is something that I would like to not have anymore, because I think women should be able to get the same titles as men. We’re capable of it, and you sort of settle when you get a lower title. That said, we have so many higher priority projects that are better for chess and for chess content than us just playing. It’s still something we really love, but you have to start prioritizing things at some point. I don’t think people know how much time or effort or it takes to compete when it’s not something you’re doing regularly.
I’m sure. I’ve never played a timed game of chess in my life.
Alexandra: Well, there’s a first for everything.
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