Chess's Silent Hall, the Restless Eye: The Myth of Expressiveness and the Real Ledger of Watching

In the Purana Paltan chess hall, the air was heavy with the smell of table lamps and the slapping sound of rain gathered outside the door. Half past nine at night. The audience consisted of only six people—three retired teachers, a photographer, and two teenagers who carry board sets on their shoulders and ferry news between the city's other halls. The clock hand moves once every second, and each movement deepens the room. No applause, no shouting, no spectator wave. Only the sound of a pencil tip scraping across a scoresheet, and one player's finger hovering over the board—that one second of stillness before a decision, where the weight of the entire match accumulates.

This is the scene that broadcast cameras never capture, and precisely this scene is what many dismiss as "chess isn't a watchable game." Recently, this exact comment surfaced in a sports discussion—from the mouth of a sports-sustainability professional who once played badminton and now works on motorsport environmental projects. In her view, chess is one of the least "expressive" sports she has ever watched. The comment is not entirely wrong. But this is where the real question accumulates: are expressiveness and watchability the same thing?

I watch chess from Penang. I was born in Canada, raised in Malaysia, but my grandfather was a club player around Dhaka's Purana Paltan, and he taught me to read a board—just as he once read a pitch. After my left knee's cruciate ligament tore at sixteen, I was no longer a winger; I became a writer. Since then a habit has formed: start not with a scoreline but with an image—a goalkeeper's gloves on wet grass, or a pawn nudged two squares forward. I named this notebook "Things the Scoreboard Cannot See."

This article is one page from that notebook. Because when someone says chess is less expressive, they are actually merging two different things: body language, and the capacity to understand a story. The first is low in chess, that's true. There's no reason the second should be low—as long as we are willing to build that layer.

Chess speaks less through the body, because it is a seated game—in that sense the criticism is correct. In badminton, when a rally unfolds, legs, shoulders, eyes—everything speaks at once; a spectator understands who is under pressure even without understanding anything. In chess the board is still, the body is still, the face is still. Much of what spectators read in physical sports—tremendous exertion, emotional reaction, the despair of defeat—is not visible here. So there is no need to argue this part. Whoever said it saw exactly what she saw.

But from here, where she goes, the calculation becomes tangled. She assumes low expressiveness means low watchability. Yet watchability depends on comprehension, emotion, and risk. A serve-and-volley point in tennis is also physically less dramatic, yet spectators sit through it—because they know which point is match point. In chess, the evaluation bar, commentary, and player cameras do exactly that work. The way these three translate chess for spectators is an unusually capable translation for a low-expressive sport.

I have tested this myself. In 2026, during lockdown, I spent three weeks inside the online chess server boom, and spoke with three International Masters in Dhaka who were playing blitz at two in the morning—because the board was the city's only open room. In that time I noticed something I never found in any theory: those who never learned to watch chess don't watch the board—they watch the evaluation bar. Who is ahead, by how much—that one line turns the whole game into a film for them.

Here is my second observation. Chess is not actually less expressive; chess is a game whose expression occurs at the proxy layer—in the clock, the bar, the commentator's voice, and the tautness gathered in a player's shoulders. Whether we place that layer before the spectator is the real question. And to be honest, in the Bangladeshi context that layer is nearly absent.

The core work of my weekly column, "The Quiet Board," is to build that layer. Because in Bangladesh, chess broadcasting means mainly print and online; there is no live television window, no franchise draft, no packed stadium, no broadcast rights. So here the drama comes from the board, the clock, and the budget line. Remove one of those three, and you lose the spectator.

Speaking of the budget line, one number must be said, one that would embarrass an administrator. The Bangladesh Chess Federation's annual government grant is roughly 1.1 million taka—less than a single bat deal for one franchise cricketer. From this money, hall rent, travel, arbiters, and training must all be managed. So when someone says chess isn't fun to watch, I often wonder: which chess did she watch? The one with good cameras, or the one with only the sound of rain and six spectators?

My third observation is more uncomfortable. Chess's "silence" is actually a manufactured silence—the board is not still; the board is a suppressed tug-of-war, where every move takes or avoids risk, and the clock constantly counts the price of that risk. Whoever says nothing happens in chess simply cannot read that calculation. This is not the game's fault; it is a gap in education. And an educational gap can be filled—that is a buildable capacity, not an extinct talent.

Now to the part no one wants to say. In my twenty-seven-year journey I have learned one thing: how expressive a sport is is determined by its spectators' habits, not by its rules. The English Premier League adopted the five-substitution rule, and as a result the final twenty minutes have gradually become a war of attrition for deep squads. The same logic applies to chess: trying to make the game "dramatic" by changing rules often fails to please the core audience. Strict measures like the Sofia Rules—where draws cannot be agreed before a certain move—are certainly good for spectators, but it must also be admitted that chess will never become badminton, nor should it.

Here I politely disagree with the criticism coming from a badminton background. Whoever comes to chess from a high-motion sport naturally has a standard of "expressiveness" tilted against chess—because she compares the movement of the body with the stillness of the board, which are two different currencies. This is not ill intent; it is merely the prism of habit. And every cross-sport comment is a signal—chess is being discussed outside its own audience circle.

But the greatest danger lurks here, and it is the chess world's own creation. Chess's real spectator crisis is not a lack of expressiveness but the draw rate—especially the quiet draws made in few moves, which never generate the drama of gain and loss on the evaluation bar. In 2026 I spent two weeks at the Dhaka Premier Division Chess League—Police, Navy, Biman, and the bank teams were hiring Indian grandmasters as guest boards. There I tracked eleven signings, and that was what first showed me that chess here runs on favors, not contracts. And those favors are traceable too.

Every evening of those two weeks I sat at a tea stall in Purana Paltan with arbiters and club secretaries. There I heard one thing repeatedly: spectators come less because matches sometimes end in a draw in ninety minutes. But no one ever said spectators come less because the board is not translated for the spectator. Between these two statements lies a world of difference. The first is an accusation against the game, the second against the management.

I think too much fuss is being made about the first. From 2026 to 2026, online chess viewership jumped—yet the rules of the game barely changed in that time. So why did the audience grow? Because the story of the World Championship, the personalities of streamers, and the simple language of the evaluation bar—these three arrived together. Expressiveness played a marginal role here; it did not play the main role.

Now if we bring all of this down to Bangladeshi soil, the picture becomes even clearer. Here chess is an unsponsored mind-sport. Parents rationally steer their children toward engineering, because there is no money in chess. No one shouts this argument; it is written silently in every admission season.

I have a quarterly audit called "Pipeline Watch," where I record the name of every Bangladeshi junior who crosses 2200. Doing this, I have faced a hard truth: we do not lose talent, we exhaust talent—through lack of halls, clubs, coaches, and the sudden grant that arrives in October. No one tells this story of exhaustion, because it has no rami, no shouting, no evaluation bar.

And here I return to the words of the badminton-background critic, but from the opposite side. What she said is an honest reaction from an outsider's eye. But within that honesty there is a gap: she assumed chess must change to catch the spectator's eye. I believe chess does not need to change—the layer around chess needs to change. Camera angles, the language of commentary, the explanation of the evaluation bar, and the translation of a player's face—do these four things properly and chess's expressive deficit is covered, because spectators are not actually looking for expressiveness; they are looking for a story.

I can say this because I have been in both worlds. In 2026 I covered a chess league in English, and before that I cast esports. In esports, an entire layer is built to explain things to the spectator—angles, zoom, slow motion, translation. Chess barely has that layer, yet chess needs it most. I have always thought the best columns are built like a rehab plan: small steps, honest pain, no shortcuts.

Now if someone asks, will chess ever become as popular as cricket or football? I will not answer directly, because the answer depends on the matter. But one thing I know for certain: chess does not lose a spectator because of its silence; chess loses a spectator because of its invisibility. Silence can be arranged; invisibility cannot. And the work of removing invisibility is not one columnist's job; it is a system's.

Here a hard question accumulates, one I have written around for eleven years: who is paying for this board? When someone says chess isn't fun to watch, I often think she may simply have never watched it properly. Because the six spectators who sat in that Purana Paltan hall on that rainy night did not buy tickets, did not ask for cameras, they were simply waiting for one move—the move that would change the whole game's calculation. That waiting can be learned. And what can be learned cannot be lost.

There is an old saying in the chess world: the board remembers everything. I would add, the board does not say everything—we must say it. I received this lesson from my grandfather, and it is now the first sentence of my column: I write that one second of stillness before a decision, and write the result afterward. If this habit enters chess broadcasting, that badminton spectator will one day stop and stand still—because the moment of stopping and standing still is actually the most expressive of all.

So the final word looks toward the future. If chess truly wants spectators, it must stop treating its own silence as an enemy and open its own ledger before the spectator—draw rate, budget, pipeline, all of it. And if someone still says chess is less expressive, I will say: you are right, but you watched the wrong game. The real question was never—how expressive is chess? The real question is—how willing are we to arrange chess so it can be watched?