Is Chess the Least Expressive Sport? Rereading a Bias from Outside the Board

I rewatched a game with the sound off. No commentator, no crowd noise, no background music. On move 31, the evaluation bar on screen quivered from level to a clear losing position after a single knight move. No one clapped. There was no leap, no shoes grinding the court, no face tightening in pain. Just a hand lifting a piece, setting it down, and a silence longer than an entire badminton rally.

It is inside that silence that an opinion now spreading across international sports pages becomes easy to understand. The person who raised it is Naganethra Reddy, a former badminton athlete now working in sport sustainability, originally from Bengaluru and based in London. She has followed Formula E, Extreme E and WEC — arenas where speed and collision speak instead of commentary. She came to chess from the side of sports where the body tells its own story, and she says she learned chess from her brother, a man very hard to beat.

Then she said something that someone who sits by the board, like me, cannot dismiss in three seconds: chess belongs to the least expressive sports.

That opinion is not groundless. It touches a real crack in the way chess is sold to audiences. In chess circles, people call it the watchability problem — whether a game can keep a viewer seated through every move. It is tied to debates that have run for nearly two decades: high draw rates, short draws, the Sofia rules against early draws introduced in 2026 at the Mtel Masters in Sofia, Bulgaria, and rapid tiebreak formats. All of them are attempts to bring audiences back to the board by making results less dull.

But there is a distance between hard to watch and least expressive. That distance is what I want to cross in this piece.

First, two concepts that outsiders often merge must be separated: expressiveness and watchability. Expressiveness is how much a sport displays its effort, emotion and momentum outwardly to a casual viewer. Watchability is how much a broadcast helps the viewer understand what is happening. A sport can be intensely expressive yet hard to watch; and conversely, a reserved sport can become easy to watch if it is packaged well.

Chess sits on the second side. Chess's expressiveness is not in the body; it is in geometry — in squares deliberately left empty, in a knight stepping into a square the opponent cannot cover in time, in the zugzwang that makes a player prefer losing a move to breaking their own structure. Viewers do not see it with the naked eye, but it is there, as complete as a smash.

Chess's problem was never a lack of expressiveness. The problem is that its expressiveness is encoded. And encoding needs a decoder.

This is exactly where the chess industry has changed over the past decade, and where Reddy's opinion is partly dated relative to reality. The evaluation bar — the engine-driven Eval Bar — is a broadcast invention that lowered the barrier to chess. Viewers do not need to know that a knight moves in an L or a bishop diagonally; they only need to see which way the bar leans to know who is ahead. It turns a reserved sport into one with an instant visual signal, like a heart-rate monitor strapped to the board.

Alongside it is an entire content ecosystem. Online chess platforms and streaming channels have turned chess from a sport of the playing hall into a sport of the screen. Players who compete while commentating, analyze while chatting, have created a new layer of expressiveness: the expressiveness of the narrator. Audiences no longer watch pieces move; they watch a person think, hesitate, and sometimes laugh at their own move.

Based on my experience following matches, what keeps chess viewers watching is rarely the best move. It is the moment before the move is made — the second when a player's hand hovers over a piece, their eyes flick to an empty square, and then they pull the hand back. Good broadcasting simply enlarges that second.

One detail easily overlooked: blitz and rapid chess are more expressive than classical chess, even though they give players less time to think. The reason is simple — the clock. When each side has only seconds left, the hands must move fast, the eyes must dart, and viewers see the urgency with their own senses. Same sport, same pieces, but the format has changed the level of expressiveness. That shows expressiveness is not fixed in the nature of a sport. It is the result of how we organize the game.

So why does someone who has lived in sport still feel chess is least expressive? Because chess's default is silence. A bad chess broadcast — and there are many bad ones — is just a fixed camera, two motionless people, and a board that says nothing. In that default, a viewer from outside the field has nothing to hold on to. They see two people sitting still. They do not see the thousands of variations being crossed out in each person's head.

Badminton differs in one very concrete way. Every effort in badminton is amplified through the body: the leap, the racket's sound, the breath, the sweat. The body is a signal transmitter that needs no translation. Chess has no such transmitter. It has only the face — and a good player's face is trained to say nothing.

That is why I do not treat Reddy's opinion as an attack. I treat it as a mirror, reflecting our own production.

There is a media feat many outsiders overlook: the 2026 world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana ran twelve classical games, and all twelve were draws. Reading only the result, people conclude at once that chess is dull. But inside those twelve draws were defensive battles lasting hours, where each side refused every trap and every move was calculated through variations deeper than human calculating ability. The dullness lies in the scoreline, not in the match. And the gap between the scoreline and the match is exactly where media must work.

In Vietnam, the story is even clearer. Le Quang Liem and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son are two names that put Vietnamese chess on the world map, but most domestic viewers know their names more than they know how they win. We lack a layer of storytelling connecting the board to the stands. A game by Le Quang Liem can hold more drama than a half of football, but if no one translates it, viewers see only a person sitting still.

I have seen a familiar reaction whenever an outsider criticizes chess: the community immediately brands that person as ignorant. That reaction is comfortable for insiders, but it closes the only door leading to new audiences. A person who has lived in elite sport saying chess is hard to watch is a data point. We may not like that data, but we cannot erase it by saying they do not understand.

And this is where I want to speak plainly, because I have been on the side considered voiceless. People said girls know nothing about tactics. So I write for them to read. But I do not write to prove I understand chess better than anyone. I write because I believe a misunderstood sport does not need to be defended by silencing its critics. It needs to be explained better.

Now the hardest part: admitting the critic is right on one point.

Defenders of chess often argue the problem lies with viewers — they lack patience, they lack knowledge. That argument is both arrogant and technically wrong about broadcasting. Viewers have no obligation to learn a new language just to be entertained. If a sport requires a degree to follow, the fault lies in production, not in the audience.

Conversely, chess's critics have a blind spot too. They measure chess with the yardstick of a muscular sport, then conclude chess loses. But the badminton expressiveness they praise is also a constructed product: camera angles, frame rates, sound enhanced in post-production. No one watches badminton in its raw form. They watch a version edited to look more expressive than it is.

The real blind spot is here: both sides argue about the nature of chess, when the right question is about designing the viewer experience. Chess does not need to become like badminton. It needs to stop broadcasting as if the viewer were already a player.

And there is a rarely mentioned paradox: precisely because chess is reserved, it is the sport most easily manipulated for emotion. A bar nudging slightly, a clock running low, a surprise move — with just those three signals, a producer can create more tension than any play. Chess is not short of material. It is short of people who know how to use it.

There is a simple test for everything I have just said. Try muting a badminton match and watching it in absolute silence. Then mute a chess game and watch it in absolute silence too. In both cases, what remains is pure motion. The only difference is that in badminton the motion is outside the body; in chess, the motion is inside the head. Viewers have not been taught to see the second kind of motion. That is a problem of visual education, not of the sport.

Tactics never lie; only those who read them do. What is true of a move is true of how we see a sport. If we read chess with badminton's yardstick, we will always find it lacking. If we read it with its own yardstick, we will find a board full of untold stories.

Sometimes, to understand a match, you must stand in silence longer than others can bear. Chess demands exactly that silence from its viewers. The job of people in media like me is to turn that silence into a story that can be heard — not to force audiences to learn how to listen.

The question I carry into the next game: if a chess broadcast were designed from scratch, for someone who has never played, would that person still call it least expressive?