The Chess Revolution — flash grandmasters finding fame and followers online

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

As Covid lockdowns rippled across the planet in early 2020, Magnus Carlsen had an ingenious idea. The global chess elite were stuck at home, just like everyone else, unable to play regular in-person tournaments. Instead, the world chess champion invited seven of his biggest rivals to join a flashy online contest, dubbed (modestly) the Magnus Carlsen Invitational. The event attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and kicked off a new boom in online chess that lasted through the pandemic to today.

As journalist Peter Doggers details in The Chess Revolution, similar online innovations continue to proliferate, while sizeable audiences flock to talkative grandmasters on YouTube and streaming platforms like Twitch. “It is a big part of the chess revolution that chess is not just something you do any more, but also something that you can watch, even if you are not that good at it yourself,” he writes.

There are other elements to the changes afoot in the game, notably its geography. Traditionally dominated by European players, and particularly those from the former Soviet bloc, energy across the board is increasingly shifting to Asia.

India’s team won a resounding victory at the recent twice-yearly chess Olympiad in September. The upcoming battle to be the next World Chess Champion in November will feature grandmasters from India and China, in a contest hosted in Singapore.

Computers eclipsed human players decades ago but machines powered by neural networks have now begun to overturn even basic notions about how the game should be played

Attempts to rebrand the sport have a decidedly Indian flavour, too. During October a range of elite players, including Carlsen, gathered in London for the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League — an exuberant new competition bankrolled by Anand Mahindra, a Mumbai-based billionaire industrialist. 

Designed to launch a more television-friendly format, the contest featured prematch fireworks, faster games and grandmasters in colourful team uniforms — all part of a ploy to borrow some of the razzmatazz of the wildly popular Indian Premier League cricket tournament.

The changes transforming chess are also partly technological. Computers eclipsed human players decades ago but machines powered by neural networks have now begun to overturn even basic notions about how the game should be played. “It feels like the chess we have played as humans for centuries is being reinvented almost from scratch,” the author suggests.

As a chess journalist, Doggers is an excellent guide to these changes. Indeed, he played a role in some of them. An early enthusiast for online chess, in 2007 he pioneered the practice of uploading behind-the-scenes clips from chess tournaments. “In a way, I started a new era for chess: the video age,” he notes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, his book is strongest towards the end, when he describes the characters who helped foment the revolution he describes, and other factors that contributed to it, such as the runaway success of Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit, which also launched during the pandemic in 2020.

Especially good are sections on Hikaru Nakamura, a brash, fast-talking American grandmaster who has become the game’s best-known streaming star, and Levy Rozman, known online as GothamChess, whose YouTube channel now boasts 5.5mn followers.

The early chapters are less compelling, however, and feel padded out by more familiar material, ranging from the game’s history to its appearances in literature. Indeed, the result ends up reading a little like a patchy chess match, in which a weak opening is eventually compensated for by a stronger endgame.

There are gaps too, notably the fact that Doggers is largely silent on the byzantine but fascinating world of chess politics, as embodied by its governing body Fide, a murky grouping still largely dominated by bureaucrats from the post-Soviet world.

Nonetheless, The Chess Revolution provides an entertaining and instructive overview of a game in the throes of reinvention. A decade ago it would have been quite possible to view chess as a fading sport, as its mysteries were solved by computers and its audiences tempted away by video games and other less taxing entertainments. Instead, by embracing a heady mix of technology and globalisation, it has been re-energised — providing a lesson for other human intellectual pursuits far beyond the sixty four squares.

The Chess Revolution: Understanding the Power of an Ancient Game in the Digital Age by Peter Doggers Robinson £20/ Puzzlewright $29.99, 416 pages

James Crabtree is author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen