Drama in the chess community was really heating up between GM Hikaru, Eric Hansen’s “Chessbrah” channel, and Chessbae. Reportedly, Hikaru was accused of copyright striking Eric Hansen’s channel. The claim came from Bent Pixels Select, which is a company that works with both Hikaru and TSM in general. In these accusations, a pair of Chessbrah (Eric Hansen’s YouTube channel) videos were copies of GM Hikaru’s and were thus copyright struck. However, GM Hikaru has come out with an apology.
Split From Chessbae Going Forward
Bent Pixels Select pointed out Chessbrah uploaded a pair of videos that were direct copyright of one of TSM’s content creators, GM Hikaru. GM Hikaru apologized for the “Chess Drama” in a Twitlonger, and said he’d no longer discuss this in public after the fact. Hikaru stated that mistakes were made, and also threw Chessbae under the bus, so it seems. According to the Twitlonger, Chessbae acted on her own volition, and he would not be working with her, going forward:
“I will no longer be working with Chessbae. I appreciate what she has done for me and the world of chess, but it is time to move on with a new team. In regards to Chessbrah/Eric Hansen, we need to connect privately to try to resolve our issues. I will not do this in a public forum and will not speak publicly about him again. As two of the game’s most high profile chess content creators, we have a responsibility to the community to at least meet as professionals.”
We do hope that Chessbrah and GM Hikaru can come together and squash the chess drama that has come up. One of the problems with the apology is, while he does admit wrongdoing, GM Hikaru does also say it’s because of how “we” are letting down the chess fans/community. That feels less like an admission of wrongdoing and more shifting the blame onto other people.
It doesn’t really feel like much of an apology. Though Chessbae and Hikaru are no longer working together, and due to this, Chessbae also lost her Chess.com moderator and Twitch/Streamer powers across her accounts. Chess.com also made a statement on Reddit:
“While we do wish to clarify that Chessbae has never been an employee of the Chess.com company, she has worked with us on behalf of streamers to coordinate and grow their channels through Chess.com. And while we appreciate the skills, passion, and commitment of Chessbae to grow chess and the streamers she works with, we recognize that her methods and communications have at times been problematic (and we feel this reached a head recently with her handling of the copyright strike against the ChessBrahs).”
Chess.com’s response was a succinct one that made sense. GM Hikaru’s didn’t feel as clear, but we do hope that in the future, he brings a more positive face to chess as an esport, and drama like this stops coming up. This whole situation is unfortunate, but we do hope the Chessbrahs and GM Hikaru come together to squash it all.
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Source: https://www.esportstalk.com/news/chess-gm-hikaru-apologizes-for-drama-with-eric-hansen-and-chessbae/
