There was some sorts of renaissance of chess in twitch community. All the big streamers were playing chess for some reason. Not sure what happened there, might be related somehow to Hikaru Nakamura starting to stream and growing pretty big. But that was before "Queen's Gambit".
Here's what happened. Excerpt from the wikipedia page [0]:
> PogChamps is an online amateur chess tournament hosted by Chess.com. Players in the tournament are internet personalities, primarily Twitch streamers. PogChamps takes place over the course of two weeks and has a prize pool of $50,000.
Basically, very strong chess players trained twitch personalities for a few days, and then had them play against each other.
It was tied to the beginning of Covid lockdowns as well. Chess has had a very strong year in terms of numbers coming to the game. Queen's Gambit seems to have exploded that again.
