Dog Playing Chess

About

Dog Playing Chess, or Shiba Playing Chess, refers to an image of a Shiba Inu playing chess against a young boy, the Shiba looking into the camera with a side-eye expression, and the boy stressfully considering his next move in the background. The image was first posted as a meme to Reddit in June 2020, gaining significant use as an exploitable object-labeling format over the course of the next year.

Origin

On June 8th, 2020, Redditor u/AverageSimpleton posted a labeled image to /r/MemeEconomy^[1] of a Shiba Inu dog playing chess against a stressed-looking boy, the Shiba in the foreground staring at the camera, and the boy in the background. The labels refer to cheating at a card game (shown below). The post gained over 20,400 upvotes in a year. The user also posted a template to Imgur^[2] (see Template subheading).

Spread

The format was incredibly successful on Reddit over the following days.

On the day of the original post, Redditor u/HorseGoesMeow posted a newly labeled version of the meme to /r/memes,^[4] garnering over 69,200 upvotes in a year (shown below, left). The next day, u/8uzzaw posted another new version to /r/wholesomememes,^[5] garnering over 50,300 upvotes in a comparable span of time (shown below, right).

On December 16th, 2020, Twitter^[3] user @wholesomememe posted the blank template, garnering over 18,000 likes and 1,400 retweets in six months. The format became significantly popular on Tumblr^[4] over the course of 2021 while remaining popular on Reddit, resulting in a number of variants over the course of the year (example from Tumblr shown below).

Template

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References