Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on the new-found popularity of chess as an esport
One of the curious consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the enormous explosion in popularity of an esport that is also one of history’s most venerable games: chess.
In March, the royal game started becoming hip on Twitch, thanks to the sterling efforts of elite grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. As quarantine took hold around the world, Nakamura streamed for hours, performing party tricks such as playing blindfold (calling out moves without ever seeing the board), or solving hundreds of tactics in ‘puzzle rush’ mode. He managed to get streamers such as Overwatch guru xQc hooked on the game too. Quite bizarrely for fans of this normally sedate sport, on May 18 Nakamura was the top English-language streamer on the whole of Twitch. What had just happened?
In the meantime, it seemed as though true top-level play was going to be a rare treat, since the regular schedule of elite events had been cancelled. Even the most important tournament in the calendar, the biennial Candidates’ Tournament to decide who should become the next challenger for the world title, had been abandoned in chaotic circumstances, with players having mere hours to rush for the few planes able to take them home from Yekaterinburg in Russia.
Enter Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion, who saw that the unusual times were an opportunity: rather than playing less chess, the world’s top players could play as much as they liked, if they did it online. Normally online play is considered a casual amusement next to the real, in-person tournaments where players can glower at each other across a table. But Carlsen, with partners such as the Chess24 website, launched his own series of online tournaments, the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour, with a sponsorship prize fund of over $1 million.
To watch these games was to suspect that it might, after all, be the perfect format for chess spectatorship. Not only could we see the board but the players, via their webcams: it was a time when everyone only existed on Zoom or the like, and so everyone was in the same virtual boat. As one commentator pointed out, too (and chess is also remarkable in that the people commenting on tournaments are usually among the world’s best active players), the contenders tended to forget their cameras were on, and with no one else in the room did not hide their emotions – of disbelief, despair, or triumph – as well as they normally do when maintaining a poker face across the board from their adversary.
Chess, in other words, was becoming more like an online videogame than ever before: a development that had long been in gestation, since the world’s most talented teenagers tend to study, train and play on 2D computer representations of the board much more often than with double-weighted, felted wooden pieces. For those of us used to the much more sedate pace of what is known as ‘classical’ tournament play – where a single game can last up to seven hours – these new online-only tournaments, with much shorter time controls (about an hour at maximum), generated much more spectacular and dramatic games, full of mishaps and heroic turnarounds, and felt a lot more like watching masterful duels of some arcane beat-’em-up.
The combination of these events and Nakamura’s Twitch takeover showed that chess had always had the ingredients of a great videogame, and what you needed to make it more intriguing to an audience of electronic gameplayers and spectators was not to change the rules, as so many failed videogame attempts to ‘update’ chess with animations or lasers shooting from rook turrets or whatnot tried to do, but simply to change the presentation and to democratise access.
As the spring wore on into a summer of unrest following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, another advantage of chess became clear, which is that, despite its symbolism of monarchy and warfare, it is vacant of particular political meaning. And so the game did not find itself in the awkward position that some of its digital descendants did, as when Fortnite, for example, quietly removed all police cars. The more faithfully a game attempts to represent social reality, the more vulnerable those representations will be to changing social attitudes.
In chess no one thinks of the knight as mounted police, or the bishop as spiritual busybody. It is a contest of pure intellect. Like many of the greatest abstract videogames ( Tetris, Tempest), chess is really a game about nothing. But sometimes, it is everything.
These new, shorter onlineonly tournaments generated much more spectacular and dramatic games
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net