Toronto Candidates - Games with Most Views

In the previous post, Toronto Candidates - Round by Round (May 2024), I developed a table of links to other resources that documented the progress of the event. For the last column in the table, I wrote,

The column titled 'FIDE Video' links to Youtube's FIDE chess Live Streams.

While I was creating that table, I noticed that FIDE chess Live Streams, also had videos for each of the 112 games played in the event: 2 events each with 8 players and 2 round robin stages per event. Since each video included the number of views for that video, this let me calculate the relative popularity of the players.

Views are in thousands, e.g. the first row means 1.388.000 views. Apologies for the four-letter codes used in the table. With databases, it is often easier to work with codes than with full names.

For the main Candidates event (the top half of the table), the codes correspond to Nakamura, Nepomniachtchi, Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Caruana, Vidit Santosh Gujrathi, Firouzja, and Abasov.

For the women's event (the bottom half of the table), they correspond to Salimova, A.Muzychuk, Goryachkina, Lagno, Vaishali Rameshbabu, Lei Tingjie, Tan Zhongyi, and Humpy Koneru.

I can't explain the relative popularity of Nurgyul Salimova among women players. Most observers of world chess would predict the relative popularity of Hikaru Nakamura, due to his streaming presence. The most viewed game was 'Round 14: Nakamura vs Gukesh'. After that GM Nakamura played in another seven of the top-10 most viewed videos.