Once ignored and marginalised as a niche pursuit for nerds, chess is now primetime TV – on BBC Two, naturally. This week saw the launch of Chess Masters: The End Game in which 12 amateur “rising stars” – six men and six women – will compete.
Not since American Bobby Fischer beat the Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky (who died last month) at the height of the cold war has there been so much interest in the game. Chess is booming around the world, becoming one of the fastest growing internet games. Rachel Reeves is well known for having been British girls’ chess champion, aged 14. The chancellor’s favoured opening is the Sicilian Defence, apparently: “It’s quite aggressive,” she has said. A new film Checkmate, produced by Emma Stone, about 2022’s alleged cheating scandal involving grandmaster Hans Niemann – he denied all wrongdoing – is in the pipeline.
In a sure sign of the game’s zeitgeist credentials, chess is the backdrop and central metaphor in Sally Rooney’s latest novel Intermezzo. Watching YouTube tutorials during lockdown, the author became fascinated by its “mathematical elegance”. As chess buffs will recognise, intermezzo (also known as Zwischenzug) is a term for “an unexpected move that poses a severe threat and forces an immediate response”. Rooney plays her characters like a grandmaster, each chapter alternating perspectives, her lovers advancing and retreating in a series of surprising and risky moves. If anyone can sell chess to gen Z it’s Rooney.
Many young people discovered the game online during Covid. Post-pandemic chess club memberships soared. This surge was boosted by the unexpected success of the 2020 Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, based on a little‑known 1983 US novel by Walter Tevis, set during the cold war, about an orphaned girl who finds stardom as a chess prodigy. The show, on which the former world champion Garry Kasparov was a consultant, was praised for its accuracy. Sales of chess boards rocketed and girls were inspired to take up this male-dominated pastime.
With its unbendable framework, unique vocabulary and history, chess is one of the oldest games in the world. It is also one of the most beautiful. There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. And its reach has been truly global. As the Guardian journalist Stephen Moss writes in his book The Rookie, chess is “a very good barometer of power”. When countries rise so does their game, with India (where the game is believed to have originated) and China becoming leading chess nations in recent decades.
Far from posing an existential threat, as was widely feared, computers and AI have given the game a new lease of life. As with reading, chess is inexpensive, you can do it anywhere and you can lose yourself in it for hours. For many, the board’s 64 squares are where they can belong, and chess communities somewhere they can thrive. No wonder it is so popular.
This isn’t the first time the BBC has taken on bishops and rooks. Capitalising on the Fischer‑Spassky fever, The Master Game, which ran between 1975 and 1983, was a quietly thrilling show in which players provided commentary (recorded later) on their match. It remains to be seen if Chess Masters can succeed in making the game riveting TV. If it persuades more people, young and old, to play it will be a winner.
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