Has The World Fallen Out Of Love With Chess?
That's the question - answered affirmatively - in this article in the Guardian. (HT: Marc B.) I have my doubts about this, as there are so many more serious players around the world than there were back in the alleged salad days of the Fischer-Spassky and several Karpov-Korchnoi matches. Maybe there is less newspaper coverage, but various alternative explanations for that phenomenon come to mind. To take three: the Cold War angle is gone, newspapers are dying and their space is at more of a premium, and interested players get all the info they want from the web - the bird cage liner is no longer needed.
It would be nice to have more newspaper coverage than we do, to recruit more "civilians" to the game, but its absence doesn't seem to me an indication that the broader world has lost interest in chess. Another indication that this is false is the plethora of popular books that came out about Bobby Fischer from the time of his move to Iceland through his death in 2008; also, there have been a spate of recent chess movies having nothing to do with Fischer over the past five years.
I do think the author is right that Deep(er) Blue's win over Kasparov in 1997 and the strength of computers in general has had an effect, insofar as it has demystified the aura of super-intelligence traditionally (and somewhat wrongly) associated with chess. But only partially, and again, this seems to me at most a story about traditional media coverage rather than the worldwide popularity of the game.
Agreed?
Reader Comments (9)
Does anyone read newspapers anymore?
[DM: Yes. But does anyone under 40?]
chess is a lot like poker, people like to play, but if someone asks what do you do for a living and you say that you make your living from chess/poker people say something like "I didn't know you could do that" granted poker has had a big explosion going on to tv as much as it has, and I like hat chess has done in general online with commentators but the difference between chess and poker is that on any one day, in any one hand, in any one tournament, anybody can be the best player, the winner when it comes to poker. long term the very best players will win, but short term, everyone has he chance to do something, and there is really a lot of analysis in poker as well, its amazing how much things have changed the past few years, a real revolution on the math of things and bringing in body language experts.
Chess unfortunately, does not allow random Joe off the street a chance to be world champion. The board is setup normal so yes he has an equal chance, but in reality we now it is not so equal as it seems. People will say oh I like chess and older people will always bring up Fischer. My point is normal people have no Hope to achieve at the highest level as with poker, and without such hope you need defining moments like with Fischer taking on the Soviets, but where are such stories anymore? How many would consider Caruana(send him back) one of us if he did return and became world champ? How many would consider Nakamura an American world champ or even get excited about him getting such a match with him being Japanese, although raised here basically forever?
American tourney players of now would likely get excited and support, but casual people, where is the connection for them to be excited about?
I think the web angle is the key. When the Kasparov-Karpov matches were taking place I was unable to follow them in my local paper (Midland, TX) and had to wait for Inside Chess.
[DM: Side note: They were covered in USA Today back then the very next day. Not quite internet speed, but faster than Inside Chess!]
Now I can follow any match or tournament I want online and in the case of something like Anand-Carlsen I can find 3-5 videos analyzing the game within hours of its completion, and then numerous others a day or so later. All by GM's, checked with strong engines.
So newspaper coverage would be too shallow and too delayed for most of the chess audience.
It reminds me of trading bootleg tapes of the Grateful Dead. Back in the 90's you were lucky to get a fifth generation (copy if a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy) a year after the concert you saw. The quality sucked, but it was what you had access to, so you made do. Today I can listen to a concert you're not even able to attend streaming online as it's being played and download a pristine copy direct from the source the next day.
Not to be overly pessimistic, but: I think that the ascendancy of computers has dealt competitive chess a terrible blow from which it's unlikely ever to recover, both for the obvious reason -- computers being able to easily destroy even the best GMs -- and because I expect cheating to become a more and more intractable problem at every level of the game.
I've heard Kasparov's analogy about car races before, but to me its premise seems fatally flawed (not to mention that there's no need to invoke modernity, since people have been racing mounted animals for thousands of years). Whether a race consists of sprinting humans, galloping horses, or fast cars, it's the same basic process -- maximizing returns from a particular physical configuration, each of which has its own intrinsic limits. The changes in constraints, and the effort to reach the edge of what's possible within a medium, are what give the race its particularity and drama. And there are truths revealed through that effort: truths about human cognition, about the physical laws that govern the world, and so forth.
But I don't think that's how chess works. For one, a race car isn't really beating a human sprinter at his/her own game, but a strong chess engine is beating a strong GM at his/her own game. For another, chess isn't really about the interaction of the physical world with the rules or constraints of the game, but about a truth-search that takes place in a completely deterministic game-universe (even if we can't fully grasp that determinism), which puts the human inability to navigate that universe in stark relief. A foot-race is inherently about being human, and is inseparable from our humanity and physicality; chess really isn't. A Ferrari doesn't trivialize Jesse Owens, and a ball-machine doesn't trivialize Rafael Nadal, but a cell phone that can easily outplay Magnus Carlsen is outdoing Carlsen at exactly the thing he does -- there is no meaningful difference -- and that can certainly make his work seem absurd or irrelevant to many people.
When you put that together with chess's high barrier to entry, it's a lethal combination: something understood by very few, and yet where anyone can punch up an app that makes the greatest players seem like novices. And I don't think chess can thrive as a personality-driven game, especially not at high levels; sure, local tribalism and Searching for Bobby Fischer narratives might enliven collegiate and scholastic events, but that still doesn't give chess relevance on the world stage. And in an airbrushed, Auto-tuned, spell-checked, CGI world, do we really expect that people will be engaged by the inscrutable efforts of people whose play is, by computer standards, essentially and demonstrably a constant exercise in failure?
I think the problem of chess being "loved" by the "masses" lies in the relatively high entry barrier to minimal competency. I don't know how many hours of work is involved in getting from learning the moves to, say, 1200 USCF -- a reasonable if perhaps dubious and/or arbitrary measure of competence -- but I'm sure it's a lot more time than the vast majority of people who learn the moves invest in it. Also, one can "play" for years with others well below 1200 and not really learn very much beyond a slowly increasing set of tactical patterns. My point is, to anyone below that level (and to many of us reasonably well above it -- 1702 USCF in my case) much of what happens in a high level chess game is rather mystifying.
In contrast, "everyone" knows how to play golf, tennis, baseball, soccer, etc., and can easily relate to watching them regardless of their level of competence. Same for poker: few people are really "competent" at it, yet with hidden cams at table level to see hole cards, computer graphics showing the odds, and interesting commentary, it works on TV.
That is the thing that chess needs to overcome to be "loved" by the "masses" -- a way to make it interesting to people regardless of competence. Until someone figures that out, I fear chess is doomed to be interesting to only a small minority -- except for the occasional event like Fischer-Spassky that has a backstory above and beyond the chess. Andrew Paulson's "chess casting" idea (in the link to the previous article) has some cool ideas, but it doesn't seem to be working too well by itself.
I too suspect chess is less popular than other sports because it requires significant effort to understand and there aren't many stories of your average Joe doing well at a popular event. I think Advanced Chess could become popular since the players would appear more active than during a normal chess game.
[DM: By "Advanced Chess" are you referring to correspondence chess, or to what happens in big open events? Yeah, we definitely need more of that.]
Norwegian State Television (NRK) and the biggest newspaper (VG) both had live broadcasting and / or webcasting from all games in the Anand - Carlsen match. They both got viewers in the 6-figure range, which is pretty darn good in a country with 5 million people. So I think "love of chess" still got some potential.
Some of the programs were actually close to one million viewers according to this article (sorry, Norwegian only): https://www.aftenposten.no/100Sport/sjakk/Carlsens-VM-seier-stor-drahjelp-for-sjakk-OL-404479_1.snd
As to al F's comments, this is actually addressed in the Guardian article: "What coverage there has been is of Carlsen ... . There is no attempt to get to grips with the actual chess."
But the point is valid: Chess needs heroes - the article, written from a UK perspective, also mentions that things are different in India, Armenia, Russia and other ex-Soviet countries. England currently lacks chess heroes: Adams is (again) successful but not mediagenic. Short in his own way appeals to media (talkative, opinionated) but is past his prime and no longer living in England. Howell couldn't fulfill bold predictions by the London Classics website ("a future world-top player") but merely shares the year of birth 1990 with Carlsen and a few other players. It's already different here in the Netherlands: Giri is fully accepted as a local player - even though he ended up in the Netherlands by accident (his father's job). And van Wely is at least good for a story or two.
As to the impact of newspapers in general - they still reach an audience beyond those already well-acquainted with chess and chess sites on the Internet. This applies to Giri coverage in national newspapers, and even to the local newspaper where I live: some people think I am sort of a chess superstar because I am doing rather well in my own club (about 20 members) on an island with 12,000 inhabitants, and even in the seventh Dutch league. Less than Dennis doing well in events in Indiana, and both of us aren't really close to the top in our respective countries :).