Chess has been a huge part of Russian culture (compared to the US) for like a century. I imagine we'd have more with state/popular support. I doubt the average American can name any American player besides Fischer, even though we've had the current world #2 for years (Caruana, although he may slip to #3 this month).

A tad bit unfair re: Caruana, considering he's flipped back and forth between the US and Italy a bit, most recently as 2015. Hikaru Nakamura is a bigger personality, he might have marginally more name recognition, though generally the point is well made.

Hikaru is making inroads with streaming culture, so honestly the group that might know him best are younger people, not even necessarily chess players. He's known for... well, being exactly himself, and it fits perfectly with the rest of streaming culture, so honestly it's a great match.

While we're talking about money, Hikaru has 4.4k subscribers [0] on his twitch channel, of which he makes $2.49 per (so $11,115.36 per month), in case you were curious about what kind of monetization he's able to create out of this.

    [0] - https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru

he has >1M subs on youtube, and I hear CPM on chess content is among the highest in the industry, so he's probably making quite a bit more even without sponsors

Yeah Hikaru is really great content.

If you're a novice (or even club) player and you've never seen a video of him solving puzzles, do yourself a favor and watch one [0]. The goal is to make the best move (usually winning a piece or forcing mate) as fast as possible. Chances are he can find the best move before you can even locate both kings on the board, unless you have some practice solving puzzles.

It really seems impossible. The puzzles I'm proud to have solved in a minute or two he will literally solve in 2-3 seconds.

Really drives home the difference between a GM (though Hikaru is fast even for a GM) and the average player.

    [0] - https://youtu.be/sPE_ve1CrHo?t=20

I doubt the average American can even name Fischer.

Yeah maybe most Americans over 60 or something. He was huge domestically at his prime.

Maybe you'd also find it interesting that Iceland holds the highest ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess...

Russia actually has even bigger factual ratio, because a lot of GMs in other countries are from exUSSR, which usually means 70% Russia, 20% Ukraine and 5% Kazakhstan. I just checked three top players in Australia, two of them are clearly exUSSR guys.