When Chess Is Called the 'Least Expressive Sport'

On a June evening, as the final game of an international chess tournament came to a close, I stayed behind alone in front of my screen with my notebook already open. The coffee had gone cold long ago. On the page were three columns of figures I had just finished filling in: the average thinking time per move, the number of moves in the first fifteen minutes, and the conversion rate of a small advantage into a full victory. No one in the commentary room asked me about those numbers. The audience asked only one question, over and over: Who is winning? That question, in a way, is the whole story. When an outsider looks at a chessboard, they see no sweat, no speed, no decisive leap in the final minute. They see only two people sitting in silence. And it is precisely that silence that has become the centre of a debate I have followed for many years. THE CONTEXT OF A CRITIQUE This time the debate flared up from a commentary by Naganethra Reddy, a former badminton athlete now working in sport sustainability. Born in Bengaluru and now based in London, she carries experience across several elite sports, from badminton to Formula E, Extreme E and WEC. In her article, she places chess among the least expressive sports. The first thing worth noting is that she never says chess is bad. She analyses no game. She names no player. She speaks about the viewer's feeling, about sitting in front of a board and sensing nothing of what is happening. Her own reference point for chess, according to what the article reveals, is amateur: she took up the game thanks to her brother, whom she admits was very difficult to beat. No Elo rating, no title, no competitive record is mentioned. In other words, this is an aesthetic opinion, not a technical claim. And in my nearly half a century of experience, that is the most dangerous kind of claim, because it sounds harmless yet touches the single biggest knot in the entire industry: watchability, or the ability to hold viewers. Let me be clear: this is not a competitive news piece. No tournament, no player, no result is discussed. Its real value lies elsewhere — it is a sample of opinion from the outside, from someone who understands very well what sporting appeal means yet approaches chess only at an amateur level. THE CORE ANALYSIS I have spent 48 years measuring sport, and the first lesson I learned is this: expressiveness is a concept belonging to the audience, not to the athlete. A sport can be intensely expressive to insiders and utterly silent to outsiders. Weightlifting is the mirror image: lifting a 200kg barbell is maximum expressiveness to the naked eye, yet very few people sit and watch for three straight hours. Chess goes in the completely opposite direction. The drama of chess lies at the cognitive level. When a player spends forty minutes on a single move, what is happening inside his head is a battle no camera can film and no microphone can capture. I have sat in commentary rooms and seen it through the data: a combination begins forming long before the first piece is moved. Everything on the board is data waiting to be read — if you are willing to sit down. But this is the part that critics of chess usually overlook. For more than a decade now, the chess world itself has solved the expressiveness problem in its own way. The engine evaluation bar, commonly known as the Eval Bar — a graphic showing the real-time balance of a game — has lowered the entry barrier to an unprecedented level. Today, someone who has never played chess can glance at the screen and know who has the advantage, simply from a single coloured bar. Alongside that, commentators tell the story. Players stream live and explain each move in everyday language. Analysis channels turn dry games into content with rhythm, with climaxes, with protagonists and antagonists. That is a revolution in storytelling, not in the rules. And the numbers do not lie. Chess has grown strongly on online platforms for several consecutive years. Online tournaments draw hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. That is not the sign of a least expressive sport on its deathbed. It is the sign of a sport finding a new language to retell a very old story. Esports and top-level football differ only in the screen; their operating systems are exactly the same. Chess is walking that very path: from the stands to the screen, from passive observation to guided interaction. The irony is that the very tools of the video-game industry — progress bars, live statistics, information overlays — have become a lifeline for a game of the mind centuries old. THE COUNTER-INTUITIVE ANGLE But I will not side with the crowd too easily. Reddy's critique, though it comes from an amateur perspective, touches a truth the chess world sometimes prefers to hide: a high draw rate and short draws remain the biggest enemy of the general audience. A newcomer to chess can easily encounter three consecutive draws, each ending after only thirty moves. To insiders, these are tense technical battles in which both sides play near-perfectly. To outsiders, they are three occasions on which the screen changed nothing meaningful. The difference between these two views is not a matter of personal taste — it is a matter of experience design. And here I must speak plainly. If the chess world responds only by rejecting critiques like this, it is covering its own ears. Conversely, if it treats every criticism as a signal to improve — tournament formats, story packaging, ways of drawing viewers inside the game — it will grow stronger. Exactly as I once wrote about football: the empty stadiums of 2026 were the most perfect laboratory football ever accidentally created. The pandemic forced everyone to try things they had never dared try before. Chess does not need a pandemic. It needs a strong enough reason to innovate, and a critique from the outside, however amateur, may be exactly that reason. CONCLUSION What I have learned after nearly half a century of watching sport is this: the line between expressive and dry does not lie in the sport. It lies in the storyteller. Badminton can become boring if people only count points. Chess can become breathtaking if people know where to look. I no longer believe in miracles on the field; I believe only in the conversion rate of chances. With chess, the chance is the moment an ordinary viewer suddenly understands why that last move mattered. That moment does not come from the board. It comes from the person who taught them how to see. The real question is not whether chess is expressive. The question is: have we given the audience enough tools to feel it?