Alyssazhu’s Chess Stream Interrupted by Racist Speech

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Warning: The following clips contain an aggressive display of racial harassment, including several swear words and an insult.

Chess streamer Alyssazhu was streaming live on Twitch from a park when her camera was knocked over ahead of a racist rant against one of her opponents.

Alyssazhu is a 22-year-old Canadian chess streamer with over 20,000 followers. During a Twitch stream from Nathan Phillips Square in central Toronto last week, she experienced a shocking incident which was captured during the broadcast and the clip has now gone viral and currently has over 90,000 views.

“I’ve never come across anything like it in my previous broadcasts there,” she told Chess.com of the shocking incident.

Alyssa says she decided to remove the VOD from the stream due to the language used, but a clip is still available.

Zhu says his tripod and phone were knocked over by a bystander. “He just walked past my camera and knocked it over.”

After the camera was put back in place, he launched a racist rant at another viewer, she said. Esports and gaming site Dexerto reported the person was another spectator, but Zhu tells Chess.com it was the same guy who knocked his phone over.

Off-camera, he can be heard saying, “I’m sitting here minding my business, you don’t think of me, you fucking blunder. Damn, you stay there and vegetate, damn n*****.

She explained: “The viewer was trying to take pictures and his phone was pointing in the general direction of the perpetrator, and it looks like the perpetrator thought he was being filmed, which he wasn’t. I think that this provoked the racist diatribe.

“According to a member of my community who was there, he also had a bottle of alcohol.”

Alyssa and her opponent remained remarkably calm during the incident, as she didn’t want to escalate the situation.

“I think it was obvious that this guy was drunk or stoned, and there was no need to engage. There were quite a few people there, so I didn’t feel any danger or threat, and eventually he gone,” she said.

“The guy was clearly mentally ill and maybe didn’t even know these incidents were being recorded. Hopefully he gets the help he needs.”

IRL (“in real life”) chess streaming has been a rapidly rising trend over the past two years, thanks to the boom in chess over the past couple of years. But since streaming takes place outside of the normal framework, it also increases the risk of unexpected incidents.

In 2021, Dina Belenkaya was arrested by Russian police while broadcasting a chess game from Red Square in Moscow.

Nemo was also forced to cut off her stream on a college campus in California where police asked her to stop filming.

POV: When your failures are so bad the police come pic.twitter.com/LZMcaATtXJ

— Nemo (@akaNemsko) October 1

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