Expressiveness Is Not Watchability: Where the "Chess Is Boring" Calculation Actually Breaks

Hook

"Who is winning?"

The colleague at the next chair in my Mumbai desk asked that question on move twenty-seven of a rapid game. On screen the engine evaluation bar sat almost level. I pointed at the bar. He did not understand. Then I said, "Nobody has won yet." He laughed and said, "Then what is the point of watching this?"

In that same minute a quote arrived on my phone screen — from Naganethra Reddy, a former badminton athlete and sustainability professional working across Formula E, Extreme E and the World Endurance Championship. Chess reached her through her brother, inside the family, outside any competitive structure. Her point was brief: chess is one of the least expressive sports she has ever watched.

One spectator's discomfort, one single-line remark. And a fresh calculation worth entering in my ledger.

Context

The first thing to state plainly, because it sets the foundation for everything after: Reddy has no chess expertise. Her credibility comes from the badminton court, then from the motorsport paddock, then from committee seats. Chess is, for her, the eye of an amateur enthusiast. That is not a mark against her; it is precisely where the value of the remark lies. This is not expert testimony. It is an outsider's sensation — and an outsider's sensation has its own use, one that no grandmaster's analysis can supply.

Second: the source itself carries no attribution. No date, no event anchor, no competition, no player, no federation. Each information point is effectively marked as unsourced. What we have, then, is a commentary fragment around which an opinion has formed while no evidence has been assembled. In my trade that distinction matters most of all: an opinion and a proof never sit on the same line.

So what is the question actually about? It is about a variable called "expressiveness." I call it the viewing surface. It is not move quality, not opening theory, not engine evaluation. It is simply what appears on the screen. In badminton that surface is rally speed, bodily jolt, the face after a lost point. In chess it is almost nothing: two seated people, a faint movement of fingers, a clock. Physically, chess is inherently inexpressive. That part is entirely reasonable, and I will not argue with it.

But this is exactly where the calculation slides.

Core

Physical expressiveness and watchability are not the same variable — conflating the two is the central error in this remark.

I have read score-sheets and tape for more than forty-five years, and my experience says: no sport becomes watchable because of bodily movement. It becomes watchable because of stakes, because of narrative, or because of comprehensibility. Chess has bet on exactly those three, and it has done so by layering surfaces on which there is no body at all, yet drama still appears.

The engine evaluation bar does precisely that job. To answer the colleague who asked "who is winning?" on move twenty-seven, I needed a bar — something that translates a configuration of pieces into a number. In professional broadcast it is now indispensable. Around it sit commentary, reaction cameras, and the player's own streaming personality. Broadcasters like Hikaru Nakamura do exactly this: they break the board's silence into words. Together these form a set of proxy expressive channels. What chess does not show in the body, it shows in the interface.

But without that interface the game genuinely is dark — and that darkness is the real barrier, not aesthetics.

For a new spectator, the largest obstacle in chess is this: he cannot tell who is ahead. Football has a scoreline, cricket has runs, badminton has a score — all instant. In chess the meaning of a position is buried in the arrangement of pieces. In 2026 I digitized 1,240 games from forty-one Bangladeshi National Championships — a second-hand scanner, Daily Star, Ittefaq and BSS clippings, eleven months. Every game went through an engine and I logged average centipawn loss. In 2026 Niaz Murshed's games averaged 28 ACPL. The 2026 title field averaged 47.

That nineteen-point gap is invisible to a camera. Both players sit still, both look calm, but one keeps making small errors and the other does not. The information that is the game's true drama does not surface on screen, because it is encoded, not displayed. A nineteen-point gap is not an opinion; it is where the story went missing.

Here I partly agree with Reddy and partly disagree. She is right that the surface is silent. She is wrong that silence means an absence of watchability.

At the 2026 Batumi Chess Olympiad I logged all forty-four games of the Bangladesh men's team board by board, while the wires carried only results. Positions where the engine gave +1.00 or better numbered thirteen. Bangladesh converted three — twenty-three percent. Nine of eleven losses arrived after move thirty-five, in time trouble. That story does not fit into any broadcast bar. To see the drama hiding between thirteen winning positions and three conversions, you have to know how to read a score-sheet after move thirty.

Put simply: chess drama lives in the spreadsheet, not on the stage. This is why the game seems dull to an outsider and unbearably taut to an insider.

In 2026 I refused for six weeks to count online games — mouse slips, no touch-move rule, unverifiable settings. Then I built a time-per-move model on 412 online games and found an error rate roughly 2.3 times that of over-the-board rapid play. In that same period I set beside it the BCF's annual government grant of about Tk 11 lakh, and the online blitz prize stream Ziaur Rahman was chasing. Two different realities, one game. These gaps are not visible on screen — only in the ledger. I digitized the past so the present could not lie to me.

So the question becomes: are audiences growing or shrinking? The leap in chess viewership between 2026 and 2026 did not come from bodily movement. It came from stakes — the significance of a match; from narrative — the story of a title cycle; and from accessibility — new spectators learning to read the board through the interface. Expressiveness is not the primary driver here. Stakes, story and accessibility are.

And note this: the real watchability debate inside the chess world is not about body language but about draw rate and short draws. Measures like the Sofia Rules exist precisely for this, to forbid agreed draws before a set move. Reddy's remark does not come near that debate. She is talking aesthetics; insiders are talking format. The two conversations are not the same, and merging them misreads both sides.

Contrarian

Now the caution my trade demands most: correlation is not causation.

From Reddy's remark many will leap to a conclusion — chess is inexpressive, therefore chess is less watchable, therefore chess is commercially weak. The first link is right, the second is unsupported, and the third directly contradicts recent data. Her view is pessimistic relative to the fundamentals. The reason is simple: her baseline was built on the badminton court and the Formula E track — both high-speed, high-visibility sports. That baseline is structurally biased against chess. It is not her fault; it is a property of the comparison.

A second risk nobody prices in — the risk of overcorrection. If the game chases gimmicks and shortened formats in a race to be "expressive," it will lose its core audience. Purists watch chess precisely for that depth and that silence. Build policy without distinguishing physical expressiveness from watchability and both sides lose.

Third, an odd point: controversy of this kind usually increases engagement with a sport, not decreases it. "Is chess boring?" is itself a marketing event. But do not let that turn into confusion. The clue sits inside Reddy's own phrasing: she wants to understand what makes people watch, follow and connect with sport. That is a marketing and fan-engagement lens, not an aesthetic verdict. And right there her own framing undercuts her conclusion — because engagement is measured in retention rates, not in taste verdicts.

What is the industry-level effect? Negligible in magnitude, but not zero. Youth training and the talent supply are untouched — there my forty-one championship files say the problem lies elsewhere. Online platforms and streaming are slightly more exposed, because they depend on retaining casual viewers. Sponsorship carries a mild perception risk over the medium term. But this risk is partly self-neutralizing, because the engine bar, expert commentary and personality-led streaming were built exactly against this attack.

I have heard claims of this kind for a long time. The spreadsheet does not argue; it waits for the next correction. My ledger has a standing column headed "positions won, points banked" — it is the only honest answer to this debate, because it is a calculation, not a sensation.

Takeaway

So the question is not "is chess expressive?" The question is: what will we measure over the next four cycles? Are platform daily-active viewers and watch-time holding, or is it only a swarm of curiosity arriving and leaving? Are federations and organizers bringing draw-rate reform proposals? And most important — are new spectators actually learning to read the board, or only staring at the bar?

If my move-twenty-seven colleague asks again next month, "who is winning?", and this time he catches the answer himself — then the calculation changes. Until then, silence is my dataset.