Nakamura signs with premier esports team TSM

by Shahid Ahmed - 28/08/2020

Few months ago we reported about Nakamura making a cameo in award-winning and critically acclaimed series Billions. He did not stop there, he kept growing the game by involving more mainstream stars in chess. He even taught chess to World Strongest Man 2018 - Hafþór J Björnsson aka 'The Mountain' of Game of Thrones. Few days before his impressive performance at Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Finals, Nakamura crossed 500K followers on twitch which means his reach to the general audience through the sport chess definitely increased by that much. With that rapidly gaining momentum, few hours ago TSM tweeted about their signing with Nakamura. This is only going to be good for chess in every aspect one can fathom. Photo: Amruta Mokal, logo: Wiki

Nakamura continues to expand his horizon

Couple of days ago Messi leaving Barcelona was a huge shocking news for all Barca fans. When Zlatan, Ronaldo or a cricketer switches their teams/franchises in be it UCL, EPL or IPL, a lot of emotions are involved among the fans. Some get happy about the player's wish and some feel sad that they have to make a difficult decision - either stick with their favorite team or support the new team where his/her favorite player is going. It can be both too. Last night when TSM (Team SoloMid) announced the signing of World no.1 in Blitz and Speed King Hikaru Nakamura, it definitely generated a lot of positive reactions in both chess and esports universe.

Nakamura signing with TSM is definitely a big deal | Photo: Amruta Mokal, Logo: Wiki

Check out this video where TSM announced the acquisition on their youtube page

Hikaru joins TSM | Video: TSM

The tweet itself generated huge positive response from both worlds - chess and esports

World's no.1 esports consultant Rod Breslau tweeted this

How the chess universe reacted to this

Giri in his usual humorous self

Vidit also shared his opinion

WGM Qiyu Zhou shared her joy

Who is TSM?

Team SoloMid (TSM) is a professional esports organization based in the USA. It was founded in September 2009 by Andy "Reginald" Dinh. TSM currently fields players in League of Legends, Apex Legends, Valorant, Hearthstone, Super Smash Bros., Fortnite, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, PUBG Mobile, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Magic: The Gathering Arena and recently included Chess. The organization previously had a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team based in Denmark that later became Astralis and also briefly owned an Overwatch team. TSM's League of Legends team has won six of the total fifteen splits of North America's League of Legends Championship Series (LCS).

TSM is sponsored by Lenovo, GEICO, Logitech, GrubHub and Twitch. Previous partners include Nerf and Dr. Pepper.

What does this signing mean?

Now you must be wondering what is the significance of this signing. Will Hikaru start streaming more Fall Guys, Fortnite or something? Well that's not the case. TSM's first question to the fans is this -

Which one would you want? | Photo: TSM youtube

So it is evident that Hikaru will be doing what he does best, do something related to chess. However it is not limited to chess only. Since TSM is a premier esports team and they have professional teams in League of Legends, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Super Smash Bros, Overwatch, Hearthstone and many more, a crossover from chess to any esports or vice-versa is highly likely.

ChessBase author WGM Qiyu Zhou signed with CLG few days ago | Photo: ChessBase

Now you must be wondering if Hikaru is the first signing to a professional esports team. Well it is certainly one of the biggest acquisition among top chess players in the world, however few days ago Nakamura himself tweeted about WGM Qiyu Zhou signing with CLG.

Announcement by CLG

Nemo also expressed her happiness on her signing

Players we would like to see in esports

Anish Giri can definitely add a new dimension with his wit to any new venture he joins | Photo: Amruta Mokal

Peter Svidler often plays Hearthstone and he speaks fantastic, so his addition to any esports team will be a big boost

Ian Nepomniachtchi already got a gaming chair plus he is a Hearthstone and DOTA2 fan, need I say more? | Photo: Nepomniachtchi's instagram

Wang Hao also loves playing video games, one just needs to convince him to start streaming

We hope World champion Magnus Carlsen still loves playing video games as the last time we saw him with a video game was in 2014 | Photo: Carlsen's fb

With over 2 Million followers in twitter, 2.3 Million in youtube, 3 Million in instagram, TSM is definitely a game changer. We can only hope more people start picking up chess and the game grows more so that more and more people get interested in investing in chess, be it as a player, spectator, promoter or as a sponsor.

Who would you like to see signing with an esports team? Let us know the player and the team's name in the comments below.

Links

TSM: website, twitter, youtube and instagram

About TSM: Wikipedia

Related news: