Anna and Pia Cramling joined the C-Squared podcast in St. Louis to discuss chess careers, streaming, and women’s participation in competitive chess. Anna explained how her streaming career began with a random opportunity to commentate at Rilton Cup, which led to Danny Rensch offering her commentary work for the Women’s World Championship and eventually launching her Twitch channel.

Anna Cramling

Anna Cramling

Chess streamer and commentator

At the time, they told me that they didn’t know who was going to commentate Rilton, which is the biggest chess open in Sweden. And so they randomly asked me, “Hey, Anna, do you want to commentate with the Grandmaster?”

And we weren’t getting a lot of viewers, to be honest. But then after that, Danny Rensch contacted me and he was like, “Hey Anna, you could be a chess commentator,” and I was like, “Oh really? This is cool! Like, you know, this really big person from Chess.com is contacting me. I was a nobody.” And so apparently someone dropped out of commentating the women’s world chess championship match…

And then after that… it all started. I opened up my Twitch channel and then I started streaming. Did you enjoy the commentary when you were doing it? I enjoy streaming more than doing commentary, if I’m gonna be honest.

Anna Cramling is doing her chess tour across the United States with her mother GM Pia Cramling. They make tons of content with top players including Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana and streamers like GothamChess. The tour concludes in Las Vegas at the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Las Vegas, featuring the first female participant Bibisara Assaubayeva competing alongside invited grandmasters.

photo: @AnnaCramling/x.com