The Absurdity of Big Chess

Babies watching Shakespeare

Gukesh vs Ding

Eighteen year old Gukesh D from India recently beat China’s Ding Liren to become the new and youngest ever World Chess Champion. The World Championship is one of the oldest tournaments in professional chess and the most important one, sort of what the World Cup is to football, and so even casual fans who don’t otherwise follow the game often closely tune in.

Chess has boomed since the pandemic and the game’s popularity is at an all-time high. So predictably, tournaments like these get a ton of coverage through livestreams, YouTube, and social media. Each game is recapped and summarized by dozens of YouTubers and grandmasters who provide their own analysis and commentary on the players’ moves. These recaps collectively get millions of views from ordinary chess fans like myself:

The screenshot doesn’t cover half of it

We can refer to this sprawling chess scene teeming with content creators, subscribers, and casual viewers as Big Chess. Like any online community, Big Chess has certain creators and players who dominate the scene and have the biggest megaphones. It also thrives on memes, controversy, and drama.

Anways, back to Gukesh and Ding. The deciding moment of this entire match happened in the very last game, before which both players’ scores had been tied. This meant that if the players drew game 14 the match would continue into tiebreaks, but if someone won it they would clinch the World Championship itself. After a relatively dull battle that looked like game 14 was heading towards a draw, Ding inexplicably played 55. Rf2, a catastrophic blunder that collapsed his position and essentially handed Gukesh a victory. Game, set, match.

Ding, playing with the white pieces, shifts his Rook from f4 to f2 on move 55, which the computer indicates is a huge blunder with the “??” notation. This move allows Gukesh to trade the Rooks and Bishops off the board and head into an easily winnable King-pawn endgame. The computer calculates this and conveys the same through the evaluation bar on the left of the board, which indicates that black has an advantage of 6.9, which is massive. (At top level chess, any advantage of 3 or more is a certain victory for that side.)

As soon as this move was played, Big Chess collectively lost its shit. Every livestreamer and commentator was in disbelief. In the video below you can see an Indian audience’s real time reaction to that move as they were watching the game live. The couple of minutes after 0:15 mark, as Gukesh slowly realizes he’s about to win it all while the crowd simultaneously erupts with joy, are really worth watching. They’re up there among the most emotional sports moments I’ve ever seen:

Here’s the funny thing about this video, though: apart from maybe the commentators on stage, none of the people in the audience who burst out with joy could tell you why 55. Rf2 is a bad move, let alone a blunder. The only reason they started celebrating is because they saw that the evaluation bar (which indicates the computer’s analysis of the position) suddenly jumped upward to denote that the game was now completely winning for black.

Essentially, the crowd wasn’t really reacting because they saw a bad move, but because a computer’s analysis told them that the move they saw was bad. If they’d watched the game with the engine evaluation turned off they would not have reacted at all, simply because most people aren’t good enough at chess to instantly calculate that this is a winning position for black. Neither am I.

This video is a perfect microcosm for what I think is so absurd about Big Chess. This is an apparatus dedicated to covering and explaining grandmaster-level chess games to casual viewers, but there’s fundamentally no way for casual viewers to ever understand what is truly going on at a grandmaster-level chess game.

That’s because the delta between ordinary chess players and a World Champion level grandmaster is so wide that no amount of explaining a move will ever really explain it. Because a chess move isn’t about the move, it’s about the lines that lead from that move, the calculated endpoints of each line, and all the moves that were not played instead. To understand a move - and a game, which is a series of such moves - would require a deep understanding of chess which most people, myself included, simply don’t have.

Think about it this way. There are around 2,000 grandmasters in the world right now. There’s no way for an adult chess player to become a grandmaster, even under the best of coaching, because adult brains simply do not have the neuroplasticity necessary to embed within themselves that deep chess instinct required to compete at a GM level. So the gap between a regular chess player and a GM is already unsurmountable.

Now, to take things a step further, there is another huge gap between a typical GM, and one who’s ranked top 50 or so worldwide. Let’s call these top players super GMs. Again, it’s well known that if a regular GM were to play a 14-game match against a super GM, they would probably draw some games here and there, but there’s no chance they would win the match itself. The skill gap is again too high. Chess is extremely competitive that way.

So knowing these two thresholds, now try and imagine the skill gap between a regular player and a super GM. Light-years apart.

Which is why, when a GM in a YouTube video tries to explain to an audience of regular players a game a super GM played, he’s basically analyzing each move a) as best as he understands it, which will be lossy, and then b) in a way that the ordinary player could understand it too, which means simplifying it even further.

This creates an analysis of the game that’s such a watered down oversimplification of it that in some cases it might be actively misleading.

I get that to a certain extent, this is true for everything. Experts and live-participants in any sport see things inherently differently than plebians. But here’s the difference between chess and other sports: with other sports, even as a layman, a noob, I still feel like I fundamentally understand what’s going on. When I watch a football match I’m sure I don’t understand the game at Pep Guardiola’s level, but I still get how it’s is going. I know which team is dominating, who’s creating more chances, and so on. And most importantly, I can feel it. When Garnacho scored that bicycle kick for Manchester United last year, I didn’t need Peter Drury’s commentary to tell me that it was a great goal. I just knew.

This is basically the appeal of sports. It’s fun to discuss tactics and strategy and numbers, but deep down it’s something you feel. It’s why it moves us.

This isn’t the case for chess. You don’t “just knew”. With very few exceptions, you have to be told whether a move is good or bad by a higher being, i.e. a grandmaster or The Chess Engine. And even then you don’t really just knew, you sort of think you just knew. You’re not watching chess, you’re watching a proxy of chess.

If I watched a World Championship game without commentary I’d fall asleep. Sure, I’d understand the moves and the basic intent behind them, but my overall analysis of each position would be so shallow I might as well be watching a different sport than the players would be playing. It’d be like watching a Shakespeare play as a baby.

(This is why I really enjoy and recommend non-professional chess tournaments like Pogchamps and Comedians on Board, because the players in these tournaments aren’t grandmasters, so they think and play like me (read: badly), which makes the games way more relatable and exciting.)

So my basic point here is that millions of us chess casuals are genuinely wasting our time watching top level chess because unlike other enjoyable wastes of time, we have a near-zero understanding of the thing we’re wasting time on. We’re like puppets dancing to the strings of higher beings who tell us what to feel about the thing we’re watching. I can’t think of any other sport or activity for which this is true.

But here’s the kicker… deep down inside, ever chess fan knows everything I’ve said already.

All the people in the crowd who cheered when Ding blundered, all the millions who tuned in to YouTube to watch the match, every casual playing online bullet chess at 2am, they all know this.

They know that whenever they watch chess they’re watching a proxy of the game. They know how unbelievably good these grandmasters are because they know their own ELO rating and the ratings of top players. (Chess is brutally blunt that way; you know exactly where you stand.) They know they couldn’t possibly be watching the same game these players are playing. They know it’s a complete waste of time to even try and understand their moves.

And it makes no difference at all. They, myself included, continue watching. We never stop. And I don’t quite understand why.

Maybe we all just want a show. Maybe we just want to watch the best of the best go at it, head to head, in the ultimate contest of mind games, even if we might not understand the games themselves.

Maybe we got emotionally invested in certain players because we inherently like their style or because they’re representing our country, and we just wanted to see them win.

Maybe we simply want to witness brilliance, to watch a Great Move that only a Great Player can produce, and to admire its genius in awe after having it explained to us by someone else. Feints within feints within feints.

Or maybe we’re all just bored and lazy and easily succumb to whatever slop the YouTube algorithm decides to feed us that day.

Or maybe, just maybe… deep down, against any and all evidence to the contrary, we like to think that we could someday be as good as the players we watch. That we could wear suits and make brilliant sacrifices on the board, outplaying our opponent, while the chess world watches us. That our matches would someday be analyzed by others.

This is our green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will play better chess, get one step closer to mastering the sport and someday truly stop blundering. . .

And so we watch on, eyes against our screens, drawn back seamlessly into the game.