Why Is Chess 'Inexpressive'? An Attempt to See It from an Athletic Perspective

For the first time in twenty-seven years, I stopped just inside the doorway of a chess tournament hall. It was a July evening at the Bangladesh Chess Federation hall in Purana Paltan, Dhaka. From outside, I could hear nothing. Inside, I saw twenty people, twenty boards, and no motion between them. The clock hands moved, and nobody spoke, laughed, or shouted. What I was watching was a match, but my body did not recognize it as one. Chess was there; the shape of sport was not. I have covered professional athletic events—football, athletics, tennis. Chess came to me later, more deliberately, sometimes with effort. And it is here that I ran into a simple problem: calling chess "inexpressive" is easy, but the deeper cultural and technological gap behind that claim is something we usually avoid. Recently, Indian badminton Olympian Naganethra Reddy made a remark—that chess is among the least expressive sports she has watched. Her comment came in an interview where she was also discussing her sport-sustainability work. And because of her comment, I keep returning to that room where I once stood. Whether chess can be called inexpressive is really a fusion of two questions. First, physical expressiveness. Second, spectator experience. In badminton or football, the athlete's body is the primary subject of the camera. Muscle tension, sweat, running, shouting, a dejected face—these all tell a story to the viewer. Chess has none of that. Chess is a silent, seated sport. Look at cards, look at poker—those also lack outer expressiveness, but they carry the drama of suspicion, bluff, and the risk of ruin. Chess has none of that either. What it has is pure reasoning, and that does not register on camera. Still, if by "inexpressive" we mean "unwatchable," that would be a serious mistake. And it is here that technology and broadcasting have introduced a fundamental change. Today's chess broadcasts run an Evaluation Bar—a white-and-black bar showing, according to the computer, who is ahead. Commentators like Alexandra Botez, Daniel King, and Giri tell us what each move means. Cameras are on the players' faces just as they are in athletic events. But the key difference is: in football, the expressiveness is on the board; in chess, it is on the screen. In July 2026, in that room in Purana Paltan, Dhaka, I stood at the start of the hardest week of my chess life. That same month, Bangladesh's highest-rated player of all time, Ziaur Rahman—fifteen-time national champion—died of a heart attack mid-game. Rating 2570. After that, I wrote a line: 'The system itself killed a champion.' It was not a metaphor. Zia ate rice with his prize money. Fitness, medical care, regular rest—he had no organization for any of it. Now if we return to Naganethra Reddy's comment, we see that her word "inexpressive" actually refers to the invisibility of chess players' physical and mental investment. The pressure on a chess player's body—playing while seated, no, that is not true. Ziaur Rahman's heart broke under that pressure. Was that not expressiveness? It was the game's tax on the player's body. Chess is a silent game—that is true. But silence does not mean an absence of expression. The resolve on Nadal's face before a serve is no more intense than what is on the face of a chess player weaving a positional trap for forty minutes; the camera simply does not catch it, because the camera looks at physical speed, not the speed of the mind. In 2026, I covered the Online Chess Olympiad. During the pandemic, chess was being played from home. And I noticed something—viewership was rising, but viewers did not understand the games. Questions came into the chat: 'Who is winning right now?' That simple question is the real crisis of chess broadcasting. Football has a scoreboard. Cricket has runs. In chess, understanding the 'score' requires a computer. But there is a constructive possibility here, which many in the chess world now acknowledge: chess is moving toward format reform—shorter time controls, faster variants, knockout. That is a conscious answer to this expression crisis. In 2026, the Bangladesh Premier Division League changed its format. I read those changes line by line. One of them was a faster play-off. One reason was viewer retention. And in chess's evolution, Bangladesh's history is a lesson. In 2026, Niaz Murshed became South Asia's first Grandmaster—a year before Anand. We have five Grandmasters; India has more than eighty. Behind that gap lies not just talent, but the system's silence. I find Naganethra Reddy's comment partly right, partly incomplete. Right in the sense that physical expressiveness is low in chess. Incomplete in the sense that expression does not mean only bodily movement. If chess is inexpressive, then it is not like football or badminton—chess's expression unfolds slowly over time, in a move, a pause, a long exhalation. Throughout my chess-coverage life, I follow one rule: every rating must be tagged as OTB or online. Because the online revolution has brought chess within everyone's reach, but that proximity has made chess's bodily expressiveness even more invisible. Now a player plays from home; the camera only sees the face. But their hands, their shoulders, the before-and-after of their breathing—nobody is there to see that. In the coming cycle, I have opened a new tracker. Since Ziaur Rahman's death in July 2026, I add a line called 'expression' or 'physical investment' to every report on a Bangladeshi chess event. Because in the game they call "inexpressive," many players pay with their bodies.