DECEMBER 21 ― Recently I ran an informal poll asking Malaysians if they noticed that more people were getting interested in playing chess as a result of Queen’s Gambit, that immensely popular mini-series on Netflix which came out in October.
While a majority of the respondents said yes, someone made an interesting remark, “I’ve got nothing against chess but I would prefer that my kids be more involved in a real sport.”
Now, how about that?
This person, like perhaps many, didn’t believe that chess ― involving people simply, uh, sitting down ― can be a (real) sport. Some folks can’t “brain” the idea that people shuffling pieces (shaped like horses, royalty, religious folks, etc.) around an 8x8 board can be called athletes.
To be honest I was, too, back in the day. Until I started playing competitively and I got my ass whipped by people who would be insulted if you suggested that chess was “just a game.”
If you’ve seen chess players competing (whether they’re playing in an average MSSD tournament or the world-class Tata Steel Championships) you’ll notice that even military snipers are less intense.
There are egos and honour at stake, not to mention medals and money.
To attain these bragging rights, chess players train as hard as any athlete in any sport.
I recall being required to attend Saturday chess training sessions, where our team captains would drill us on our openings, our middle-game, our endgame, our overall tactics, etc.
For example, a player needs to decide if he or she is a King pawn player or Queen pawn player ie. when they play white, do they open with the pawn in front of their King or Queen (if I’m not mistaken Beth Harmon, from the mini-series, is a King pawn player ― ironic, given the that the title of the series is “Queen’s Gambit” which involves opening with the Queen pawn)? Or, is the player an English Opening person, opening with the Queen Bishop’s pawn?
Obviously, competitive players also need to decide what to play as Black (both against King pawn players and also Queen pawn players).
Against the King pawn (ie. when your opponent playing White moves his King pawn two squares up), the most popular defences today seem to be the Sicilian, the French, and variations on e5 (i.e. when, as Black, you move your own King pawn two squares forward).
And each opening has its permutations, variations and so on. God help you if you can’t remember more than three of four steps ahead (see note 1).
If the above doesn’t give you an idea of how strenuous chess training can be (due to the sheer volume of possibilities involved from the first move onwards), consider too that the best players in the world must know what on earth the other fella might play.
Not unlike English Premier League managers, world-class players continually study the games of other similarly ranked players, strategising to find a way to exploit weaknesses and avoid their opponents’ best plays.
This is world war fought across a table. Remarkably enough, not unlike sprinters and runners, chess players also burn loads of calories. Neurologist Robert Sapolsky even noted that some grandmasters may burn as much as 6,000 calories in one day.
Planning, training and strategising against opponents are just a few elements which qualify chess as a sport, putting it firmly in the same realm as, say, boxing, volleyball and basketball.
It also explains why games like Monopoly or marbles (or guli-guli) probably won’t make it as a global sport; one requires too much luck and the other has minimal planning and strategising involved.
Likewise, chess trumps painting or singing as a sport because it’s not easy to say who “wins” for the latter two disciplines. Heck, in the world of art (be it visual or non-visual) even what counts as “good” or “bad” seems up for grabs.
But there are also different chess styles. Different players just, well, play differently. There are the famous attacker cum swashbuckler players like Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer who come at you with full creative force.
Then there are the positional architects like Anatoly Karpov, or the mysterious “hyper-modern” wizards like Alexander Alekhine whose famous defence against White involved moving his own King’s knight over the board as a way of luring White into a superior position in the hope of launching a counter-attack.
The point is that chess in this sense mimics footballing styles. Think of Brazil’s samba flow, West Germany’s disciplined structural play, England’s set-piece tactics, etc.
Things also take on a “global affairs” feel when you have major chess-playing countries like Russia and the United States striving for dominance in a way which mirrors the Cold War.
Bobby Fischer’s huge popularity was in no small part due to the fact that he was an American prodigy smashing up Soviet big guns.
This is, in fact, one of the key plot premises of Queen’s Gambit, with the added spice that Harmon is a woman. The bottom line is that like much of world sports, chess can’t entirely escape the pull and glamour of politics.
Finally, of course, chess has its worldwide fans. Google puts the number of chess players at 600 million. And I can tell you once you’ve started playing seriously at any level, you’d somehow qualify as a fan.
Maybe therein lies the beauty of chess and why there is no question as to its inclusion today as a worldwide sport: So many people love the game, so many people want to get better at it, so many people’s eyes light up when they see a chess board at some random venue and, of course ― as Queen’s Gambit makes it very clear ― everyone hates to lose.
Note 1: Reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen (like many grandmasters) knows practically all the variations of all these openings up to almost 15 or even 20 moves from the start. Carlsen can play simultaneous games blind-folded against a dozen players, win all of them, then later write down every move of every game. Clearly, therefore, he was playing these games by drawing on his memory of existing games ie. he simply ran the existing scripts in his mind until it was obvious (to him) his opponents were playing a losing hand after which he just mopped up.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
