Traditionally, chess has been played face to face. Outside of the actual game, there's a little bit of non-verbal "game" between the opponents as well. Many friendships have been established like that. But now chess.com and other similar platforms rule the online chess space. And it's not only playing, but also live streaming your games.

We found out more of these "behind the scenes" details related to chess from Alessia Santeramo. She is a chess champion and one of the most popular chess live streamers on Twitch. Here is her story.

Alessia Santeramo started playing chess when she was just eight years old, in primary school. After just one year, at age nine, she won the Italian chess championship under ten. She never stopped playing chess ever since.

Live streaming chess on Twitch started in June 2019, in Italian. In just half of year, she was already streaming in English on a fixed schedule, three times per week. Currently Alessia is streaming every day except Sunday for a couple of hours daily.

One of the biggest challenges for Alessia was the fact that she was always comparing her chess streams with other successful streamers from this field. She realized at some point that it's much more productive and fun to focus on herself, to give her best.

From the technical point of view, live streaming chess on Twitch is greatly influenced by your Internet connection. It is what makes or breaks a successful stream, it's never fun to lose the Internet connection while live streaming. So she wanted to make sure she can stream confidently without any buffering or drops.

The first thing Alessia did is to switch from a Wi-Fi connection to a wired Ethernet connection. That not only minimizes the chance of a disconnect, but also should increase the speed. Then, to connect both her wired and Wi-Fi connections, she did some research and found Speedify, which she currently uses.

"I was completely new, I didn't know what Speedify was. I did some research on how it works and actually it’s a VPN. Most VPNs give you privacy and security, but they are known also that they make your internet a bit slower, because you got to connect to another server.

Speedify is really the exception, because you can just put inside all the different connections that you have and you feel the difference: you just don't lose the connection, you don't experience problems."

Alessia uses Speedify in conjunction with a dedicated server. "At the moment I'm doing bets with my community, I basically don't lose anymore the connection, I have a very stable connection." As she checks the reports provided, she notices that there's a big number of stream saves although she didn't feel anything during the stream. Which is the way it should be.

In order to further improve her failover protection, Alessia also wants to toss in a cellular connection to the Speedify mix: "Just to have another source that in case my router would crash or I would just have a problem, Speedify would eliminate the latency and I would not lose the connection to the stream, which is so valuable."

As an advice to other streamers, Alessia recommends Speedify for getting a stable connection. "The best way to use it is to put at least two sources of Internet connection inside your Speedify and it's just an incredible, valuable tool."

Alessia also commented on how The Queen's Gambit show helped the chess community: "It was really fresh air to the chess world. We got lucky, a lot of new people are now interested in chess. Chess is not just for nerds, it could be also for such a cool lady like that. It's not just a game for people who don't know what to do with their life; it's actually a cool game that could be so fun, entertaining to watch, to play and to study."

And that's why we call Alessia our own Chess Queen.

When you’re having issues with your Internet connection, try using 2 connections simultaneously. Along with the home internet, you certainly have a smartphone with a cellular data plan. So why not put those two connections together to work for you? You’ll get more reliable and faster Internet. Plus extra privacy for your online activities thanks to Speedify’s encryption capabilities.

When you don’t have two connections available, Speedify can still help. Its powerful error correction algorithms minimize packet loss on wireless networks. So even if you only have one connection available, Speedify will still be able to help you with more reliable Internet.