I am also hopeful that this surge in chess interest will bring new players into the game, and perhaps result in more opportunities for play and competition in areas that currently don't have many. This is not related to Queen's Gambit/popularity, but one silver lining of the pandemic for our family has been that our 7-year-old obsessive chess fanatic suddenly has access to all sorts of chess classes, camps, and tournaments that are now online. We live in a small town with no organized chess activities for kids at all, so this is a huge opportunity for him, and he is loving it! Maybe with increased interest in chess, combined with so many chess schools/orgs learning how to run their classes/competitions online, these opportunities will last beyond the pandemic. Even better, maybe there will be enough interest for smaller towns like ours to have in-person offerings!

Chess is a great activity to do online. What does that mean for tournaments going forward? Will it become more of an online event?

There are two main reasons for in-person tournaments. The first is socialization, and the second is cheating.

Chess is not a particularly social activity, but certainly more so than staying cooped up at home. And this actually becomes more important as a player becomes more nationally competitive and there are fewer local players that are challenging.

Cheating is also unfortunately a consideration. We have seen in-person cheating even for as little as $50 prize money, and the tournament director suspected it was happening for months before he was caught (the telltale sign was that it was an adult player that rose quickly, which rarely happens). It's much harder to see/detect online cheating. It might be only a tiny percentage of players doing this, but they will ruin it for everyone.

My son has played this year in some of the national tournaments that have gone online. At least one of them required two cameras active at all times, the first being the laptop camera and a second being a phone video stream taken from the side to see if someone is looking at a chess engine while playing.