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Team Envy or Envy Gaming has signed Alexandra and Andrea Botez as part of a new content program.
Envy recently launched a new program that focuses on content creators and ambassadors. The content creator network revolves more around content in general and creators, rather than the usual competitive gaming content that Team Envy is known for. That content creation push now includes Alexandra and Andrea Botez.
According to The Esports Observer, the deal was made between the Evolved Talent Agency and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, and their consultation ended up with Alexandra and Andrea Botez on Team Envy. The two sisters are well known for their chess gameplay. They share a Twitch channel called BotezLive, in which they have garnered almost 500k followers.
Chess streams on Twitch beyond Team Envy
Alexandra and Andrea Botez have been commentators for the streamer event called PogChamps. It's a chess tournament between influencers or content creators, and it's one of the major reasons for chess seeing such high growth on Twitch, which saw a surge in interest over the summer.
The release of the series, The Queen's Gambit, could also be another reason for an increase to popularity seen towards chess.
PogChamps itself is hosted by Chess.com and is an amateur chess tournament. The event goes on for a total of two weeks, and a prize pool of 50,000 USD is given out to the winners. PogChamps started in June of this year as an event for the Twitch chess community.
For the first event, all 16 players were Twitch streamers in the community. League of Legends streamer VoyBoy was the inaugural winner of the event, and the commentators were generally Hikaru Nakamura and Alexandra Botez. A second PogChamps event was held in July of this year, and players such as Hafthor Bjornsson took part.
The FIDE confirmed that the tournaments demonstrated some huge viewership on the platform and showed that Chess could easily be an entertaining aspect of the streaming community. It's no wonder that Team Envy has taken interest in chess players as an opportunity to grow their program. The high viewership tournaments are an easy format for the Team Envy brand to be a part of.
Alexandra and Andrea Botez aren't the only streamers to be signed to organization deals either. Hikaru Nakamura and Andrew "penguingm1" yang have also been signed to orgs like TSM and Cloud9.
