When you hear a pundit describe a sports match as “a game of chess”, it’s not usually a compliment. Yet chess—long dismissed as a pastime for nerds and weirdos—has exploded in popularity. The renaissance began in 2020, propelled by the Covid-19 lockdowns and Netflix’s record-breaking drama The Queen’s Gambit. Chess websites smashed their membership records, and retailers announced that year-on-year sales of sets rose by more than 1,000 per cent. The game went viral again in 2022, spurred by two social media events. One was a Louis Vuitton advert in which the footballer Lionel Messi played against his great rival Cristiano Ronaldo. The other was an accusation that a middling grandmaster had beaten the world champion by stuffing a vibrating device up his anus.
In The Chess Revolution, the chess journalist Peter Doggers argues that the game is in a golden age. Doggers begins with chess’s political and cultural history, and then explores how it has intersected with the technological upheavals of our era: the internet and artificial intelligence.
Chess—or proto-chess—began in India in the 6th century AD. It spread to Asia and Persia before Arabs brought it to Europe in the 10th century. One of the most significant changes, inspired by Isabella of Castile, occurred in 15th-century Iberia: the queen became the most powerful piece on the board.
The game flourished during the Enlightenment—propelled by clubs, coffee houses and a broad commitment to rational thinking. In the Café de la Régence in Paris, the best player of the era, the composer François-André Danican Philidor, met Voltaire and Robespierre and played against Rousseau. In 1783, he faced an unusual challenger, one remembered in chess lore: a life-size figure of a man, carved in wood and sat behind a chessboard embedded in a large cabinet. The figure, who wore an ermine-trimmed robe, loose trousers and a turban, was known as the “Mechanical Turk”. Its inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, claimed to have created the first chess-playing machine. Although Philidor won, he said that no human player had so fatigued him, and he left the board worried about the rise of automata.
In an age of scientific acceleration, the Mechanical Turk thrilled the likes of Empress Maria Theresa, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon. There were, however, sceptics. Edgar Allan Poe, who saw the Mechanical Turk play in 1835, wrote that he was certain “the operations of the automaton are regulated by mind”. He was right. Two decades later, it was revealed that Philidor and others had been fooled: von Kempelen’s cabinet contained levers, pulleys and enough space for a human to hide.
Although the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, the device reflected and promoted the idea of making a programmable chess-playing machine. Charles Babbage, the 19th-century mathematician who created the first automatic computing engine, considered the task difficult but possible. More than 100 years later, Babbage’s inkling was developed by Alan Turing.
Turing wrote the first chess program in 1948. However, as there was not yet a computer capable of running his algorithm, he had to perform the calculations manually, which took more than half an hour per move. Turing continued his exploration of chess and AI in his landmark paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), which established his notion of “the imitation game” or “Turing test”. This paper, his inquiry into whether a machine can “think”, drew heavily on chess. Turing’s questions and hypothetical answers seem like precursors to ChatGPT:
Q: Do you play chess?
A: Yes.
Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play?
A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.
Five decades after Turing, a machine competed against the world’s best player. The matches between IBM’s Deep Blue computer and the Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov generated a media frenzy. During their first series, in 1996, the IBM match website became the most viewed in history. Deep Blue won the first game, but then Kasparov won three and drew two of the remaining five.
Kasparov agreed to play a rematch a year later. The cover of Newsweek magazine called it “The Brain’s Last Stand”. Deep Blue’s creator called it a competition between “man as a performer and man as a toolmaker”.
Kasparov respected Deep Blue’s ability to make materialist calculations but was convinced that it lacked the creativity to understand moves, such as sacrifices, that could seem counterintuitive. Kasparov won the first game, but by the second it was clear that Deep Blue had greatly improved. Kasparov offered to concede a pawn, which he expected the computer to accept, but Deep Blue instead continued with its own strategy. Ten moves later, the machine won, having played in the vein of a top human grandmaster. In other words, it had passed the Turing test.
Three draws followed, leaving a decisive sixth game. Kasparov, still confident that a machine would not be able to cope with the subtleties of long-term “human” thinking, gambled. He played moves that allowed Deep Blue the chance to expose his king, but only if the computer gave up its knight. To Kasparov’s shock, Deep Blue played the sacrifice. After just 19 moves, the world’s best human player resigned.
Even the best grandmasters now find artificial intelligence indispensable
Today, AI has upended the way the game is played, and even the best grandmasters find it indispensable. Magnus Carlsen, arguably the greatest of all time, said that AlphaZero, the chess program run by Google DeepMind, has made him “a different player”. Positions have become more complex, and chess theory is having to adapt to computers’ suggestions. For instance, machines are making humans less concerned about the safety of the king, and are promoting unorthodox sacrifices in exchange for tiny gains in momentum. Doggers writes, “They suggest the strangest moves as early as move three, as if they are playing chess from another galaxy. It feels like the chess we have played as humans for centuries is being reinvented almost from scratch.”
But the rise of AI comes at a cost to extemporaneous, “creative” play. Doggers explains that at both the professional and keen amateur levels, “chess has become a bit of a memory game”. The increased value of recall over calculation has narrowed the gap between players of different standards. Carlsen, for one, is concerned. He dropped out of the world championship, which uses a six-and-a-half-hour format, because he believes long games are now inadequate assessments of skill. Doggers writes, “Due to the intense computer preparation with the top engines, [Carlsen’s] opponents could maintain a high level just by memory for 15 to 20 moves. With a lot of thinking time [remaining] on the clock, they were becoming hard to beat in the remainder of the game.”
Adjacent to the AI revolution is online chess. As with fans of esports and computer games, chess lovers use the internet not only to play, but also to watch. Several top players, most notably the world number two, Hikaru Nakamura, combine chess excellence with social media savviness. Lower down the rankings, the vlogger Levy Rozman, the author of the New York Times bestseller How to Win at Chess, has a knack for explaining the game to players of all abilities. Similarly, the sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez—who both play and commentate—were included in Rolling Stone’s 2023 list of the most influential content creators.
The Botez sisters are in part motivated by a desire to show that women are not “genetically inferior to men at playing chess”. Although society’s attitudes to hobbies and gender are changing (note the rise in women’s football, rugby and cricket), chess remains overwhelmingly male. So far, there has been only one woman to have been listed among the world’s top 10 players (the Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgár), and only two other women have ever reached the top 100.
The Chess Revolution is an enjoyable and informative account written by a chess insider—Doggers has played basketball with Carlsen, interviewed Kasparov at Bobby Fischer’s grave, and Nakamura has slept on his couch—who finds the right balance between being accessible and satisfying the demands of more knowledgeable readers. Only occasionally, such as when he discusses the politics of online chess, does the book come close to feeling niche.
If anything, Doggers’s style is overly informal. He has a subsection called “Who is the GOAT?” and, in his discussion of the Carlsen-Niemann scandal (the one about possible cheating via rectal vibrator), he writes that “chess had hit the fan”. Sometimes, as he strives to add more excitement, the prose becomes tautological: “It was suddenly all over: Kasparov was blown off the board. He had lost the match.”
Doggers’s writing on chess in literature, film and art is more listicle than analytical—a pitfall common to many books covering cultural history. It is also centred on the west. It would have been interesting to learn more about the game’s place in the cultures of the Middle East and India, which have longer chess histories.
He is better when he turns to the current era and the recent past. In short personality studies, he vividly captures Kasparov and Carlsen, the two modern players who have transcended the sport: “Kasparov’s presence at the board was legendary. He famously removed his watch from his wrist and placed it on the table at the start of a game. He would put it back only when he knew he had a winning position.” Carlsen, on the other hand, mixes “his remarkable dominance on the chessboard with being an avid sports fan, a fashion model and even a character in The Simpsons and Donald Duck”.
In fact, the next stage of the chess revolution will be televised. In April, BBC Two announced that it had commissioned a new programme called Chess Masters—a rapid-play tournament featuring amateurs aged eight to 80. It’ll be the first time that chess has been on television in the UK since 1993, when English grandmaster Nigel Short played Kasparov for the world championship. More chess dramas are also forthcoming, possibly inspired by The Queen’s Gambit. Disney+ will release a series about Kasparov’s rematch with Deep Blue; the Carlsen-Niemann scandal is being adapted into a film produced by two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone.
The wider world is belatedly learning that chess can be fascinating, exhilarating, even fun. Given the forecasts about the development of AI, the revolution is just beginning.
