Everything you’d want to know about Levy Rozman — better known as GothamChess — in one fact-checked, dated place. He’s the most famous chess creator alive, so the internet is full of half-right trivia about him. Here’s the verified stuff, with the honest caveats where numbers change over time.
Fast facts
- Real name: Levy Rozman · Born: 5 December 1995, Brooklyn, New York
- Nationality: American (parents were Russian and Ukrainian émigrés)
- Chess title: International Master (IM) — not a Grandmaster
- Peak FIDE rating: 2421 (2018)
- Channel: GothamChess — the biggest chess channel on YouTube (7M+ subscribers, as of July 2026)
- Book: How to Win at Chess (2023) — a New York Times best-seller
The essentials
- He is an International Master, not a Grandmaster. This is the single most-corrected fact about Levy. He earned the IM title in 2018 and has spoken openly about wanting to chase the GM title. As of July 2026, IM is his top title.
- His online name is “GothamChess.” He’s also widely called “The Internet’s Chess Teacher.”
- He’s from Brooklyn. Born in New York City on 5 December 1995 to a Russian émigrée mother and a Ukrainian émigré father.
- He’s a real coach. Before the fame, Levy worked as a chess coach (from around 2014), running programs in New York City schools — the teaching came first.
The channel that ate chess
- Biggest chess channel on YouTube. He passed the popular creator Agadmator in September 2021 to take the top spot and has held it since.
- Over 7 million subscribers and several billion total views as of July 2026 — and it was the first chess channel to cross one billion views. These counts climb constantly, so treat them as an approximate, ever-growing snapshot.
- Over a million Twitch followers, where he first started streaming back in 2018.
- His big break was the 2020 boom. Lockdowns plus Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit sent a wave of new players looking for a teacher — and Levy was the one who caught it.
”Guess the Elo” and the content
- “Guess the Elo” is his signature series: he analyzes viewers’ submitted games and tries to guess their rating. It’s comedy and coaching at the same time.
- Game recaps are his other staple — fast, funny, dramatized breakdowns of famous and viral games that introduced millions to top-level chess.
- Chessly. In 2022 he founded Chessly (chessly.com), his own platform for structured chess courses.
The best-selling author
- How to Win at Chess: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners and Beyond was published in 2023 and became a New York Times best-seller — a genuinely rare achievement for a chess instructional book.
- A follow-up, How to Win at Chess, Next Level, aimed at intermediate players, extends the series.
Honors, events, and moments
- Forbes 30 Under 30. Levy was named to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Games category.
- Best Chess Streamer. He won Best Chess Streamer at The Streamer Awards (2022) and has been nominated in other years.
- “Levy Rozman vs The World” (November 2025). He played a single game against a crowd of more than 200,000 voting players — chess as a giant participatory event — and came out on top.
- A notable early moment. In 2021, Levy was involved in a widely discussed online cheating dispute after reporting an opponent’s suspicious play — an episode that briefly made mainstream news and showed how big his reach had already become.
The openings he’s famous for teaching
Levy has explained a huge range of openings in his beginner-friendly videos — from the London System and the Caro-Kann to the Italian Game and even the offbeat Scandinavian Defense below.
Off the board
- He studied statistics. Levy holds a degree in statistics from Baruch College — an amusing fit for a guy whose signature show is literally about guessing numbers.
- He’s an entrepreneur. Between the channel, the courses (Chessly), and the books, GothamChess is as much a business as a broadcast.
A note on “net worth” and live numbers
You’ll see a lot of sites confidently list Levy’s “net worth” and exact subscriber counts. We deliberately don’t publish a hard net-worth figure — those numbers are estimates with no reliable public source, and they go stale instantly. What’s verifiable and stable is the shape of the story: a titled player who built the biggest chess channel in the world and wrote a best-selling book. When we cite a count (like 7M+ subscribers), we stamp it “as of July 2026” and keep it approximate on purpose.
FAQ
Is Levy Rozman a Grandmaster? No — he’s an International Master (IM), earned in 2018, and has talked about pursuing the GM title.
How many subscribers does GothamChess have? Over 7 million on YouTube as of July 2026, making it the biggest chess channel on the platform. The number keeps rising.
How old is Levy Rozman? He was born on 5 December 1995, in Brooklyn, New York.
What is GothamChess’s real name? Levy Rozman.
Keep exploring
Dig into his rating history, his playing style, his openings, and his best games and moments — or head back to the main profile and browse all chess players.
Written and fact-checked by the Chess Lab Academy Editorial Team · Facts verified against Wikipedia, his FIDE profile, and Chess.com, as of July 2026 · Last verified 2026-07-10 · How we verify content.