GMHikaru vs Magnus Carlsen: Which Chess personality is more popular in 2024?

Hikaru Nakamura, who goes by the online alias GMHikaru, and Magnus Carlsen are arguably the most popular Chess personalities in the world. While former World Champion Carlsen may be one of the most well-known names in the sport, Nakamura has a very strong presence on social media due to him being a full-time streamer on platforms like Kick and Twitch.

Under the alias GMHikaru, he is the most successful non-branded channel on Twitch, and the five-time US Chess Champion boasts about 1.9 million followers. Magnus also has an account on the Amazon-owned platform but rarely uses it. The channel currently has about 300K followers.

With GMHikaru recently taking up a chessboxing challenge from Magnus Carlsen after the latter lied about his possibility of winning on a lie detector YouTube video, let's set aside their skills as chess players and look at who the most popular personality is in 2024.

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GMHikaru vs Magnus Carlsen popularity comparison in numbers

We have already gone over how Nakamura dominates in terms of followers on Twitch. This speaks a lot about how popular the streamer is in the online chess community. Hikaru is known for breaking down popular games, from historical matches to recent competitions.

He also goes live and interacts with thousands of people in his audience regularly on the website as well as the relatively new streaming platform Kick. This has garnered a bit of backlash from others, with chess players such as Hans Niemann calling him out for doing gambling streams on Kick.

GMHikaru also uploads clips from his streams on YouTube and has over 2.34 million subscribers. In comparison, Magnus Carlsen uploads maybe three or four videos to his official channel in a month and has less than half the subscriber tally at 1.2 million.

That said, as a former World Champion who lost his title to Ding Liren last year after deciding not to participate, Magnus Carlsen still has a huge fanbase. According to Google Trends, the Norwegian still dominates on the search engine. Below is a graph comparing Nakamura and Carlsen's search trends since January 2024.

Search term popularity since January (Image via Google Trends)

A short comparison of their Instagram and X accounts also reinforces the idea that while GMHikaru has made a name for himself on YouTube and Twitch, Magnus remains highly popular among the more conventional chess fandom, with over a million followers on X and another 1.4 million on Instagram. On the other hand, Hikaru has about 500K on X and 900K followers on Instagram.

Both of them are undoubtedly the most popular chess personalities online, as the two Grandmasters not only have ardent followers because of their excellent skills in the game but also have maintained good social media presence. Fans naturally love to see the two go head-to-head in over-the-table IRL competitions.

There was a big event scheduled for late 2023 that was supposed to coincide with Ludiwg's Chessboxing Championship. However, in October, GMHikaru revealed that the event had been canceled due to sponsorship problems and broadcast rights. In December, the two did meet for an Armageddon Chess match at the 2023 CCT finals, where Carlsen came out on top.

With talks going on about a chessboxing matchup between the two, there is a renewed interest from fans regarding their possible showdown. While Magnus Carlsen holds an advantage in the head-to-head stats, Hikaru Nakamaru has been in quite good form.

This month, the American Grand Master managed 2024's first Titled Tuesday Sweep by winning both tournaments on April 23. Magnus only managed to finish fifth early and third place late.