The war against excitement

If modernity is the tireless battle against boredom, then chess is the unceasing battle against excitement. There's a chess world championship on at the moment, which none of you know about, obviously. Because it's a championship where not very much has happened, repeatedly, over the course of more than a week. Ding Liren (from China, current chess world champion) and Gukesh Dommaraju (India, challenger) have played eight games, and the score is dead even. Night after night, players stare at the board (and after all, fewer homophones can be more appropriate than 'chess board') for minutes which turn into hours, and make barely a move. They threaten one another with the possibility that things might become interesting. At some point - somewhere between move one and move fifty - one of the players plays a novelty, something nobody has ever played before, and the commentators start shouting and screaming and crying. Nothing exciting has happened, and they get excited anyway. 

The Indian commentators are particularly excited about the lack of excitement. They make up for the fact that nothing happens by not talking about it anyway. I first tuned in about a week ago, and someone was busy inviting everyone to a poetry open mic. (Most of you will know that this is obvious my kind of boring.) Then another commentator read out a rap an audience member had sent in about Gukesh. And this kept on happening. Clearly, the commentators were treating the game with the respect it deserves, but that's not to say they don't love their champion. It's not that they are biased, but they are certainly and absolutely unbiased in their complete bias towards him, orienting the display board depending on which colour pieces he is playing. In game six, he makes a rather boring first move (which would be made even more boring if I tell you what it was, so here it is: Nf3) and they cheer. Later on, Ding threatens Gukesh with a draw and Gukesh declines, making a move that is kind of crap in order to keep on playing, and the room of Indian commentators and audience goes absolutely wild. A few moves later, there is a draw anyway. Both players achieve the finest victory of all: of not losing. I love it. 

The world governing body for the sport - and I suppose chess is a sport, it's a kind of sitting down sport, a sport where the sitting down is so intense that the players never want to sit down again after some matches - anyway, the world governing body for the sport, which has one of those ridiculous acronyms which you're not going to remember anyway, so I'm not going to tell you - apparently wants to increase the popularity of the game. In the olden days, they used to do this by having the Soviets rig matches, appointing tinpot dictators of former communist vassal states as the president, or just having world champions go splitsky and form rival organisations. Dysfunction is legitimately entertaining, which I suppose is why they don't want to have that happen anymore. Instead, they want to do it by, like, streaming and stuff. It'll never catch on. It's adorable. Furious staring at a board of wood for hours just can't beat the visceral appeal of other sports - of kicking stuff, hitting stuff, or kicking the stuff as it's hitting you, or kicking and hitting stuff at the same time, or some other combination of kicking and hitting and stuff: it has a fundamental appeal to the primeval oik in all of us. 

Chess is a great game. I really recommend it. Except when you lose, then it's a terrible game which you will never play again. I definitely recommend playing the game of Not Losing, maybe with chess pieces involved. Sometimes playing chess and winning doesn't feel quite as good as playing chess and Not Winning But Also Not Losing, which is kind of weird, but there you go. I don't really have a point here, but neither does chess. Which is also great. Things that don't have a point are always interesting. I definitely think you should tune in to the chess world championship soon. 

Or, you know, not. But only if you have more boring things to do. You wouldn't want things to get too exciting.