Chess might be one of the least expressive sports I have ever watched. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. I come from sport, first as a badminton athlete and now through my work across motorsport. I’m used to being able to see competition.
In badminton, pressure travels through the body. A player gets tighter. A stroke that normally lands doesn’t. A “come on!” escapes after an important point. Motorsport gives you almost the opposite extreme: speed, lights, noise, cars fighting for position, drivers taking risks at ridiculous speeds, occasionally making contact while trying to outcalculate each other.
Then I watched the Global Chess League. Two people. One board. Almost absolute silence. And the commentators are talking about attack, defence, chaos, sacrifice and control. There is a king being protected, a queen under attack, knights moving into position. Someone is setting something up now that may only make sense several moves later.
When the quiet gets loud
I remember watching Javokhir Sindarov opposite Viswanathan Anand. Sindarov’s leg kept shaking. Anand sat across from him, arms crossed. At one point, Anand made an unexpected move and immediately glanced up at Sindarov before looking back down. It lasted perhaps a second, but I couldn’t stop looking at them.
Was the shaking leg nerves? Completely normal? Did Anand even notice it? When he looked up, was he checking Sindarov’s reaction to the move? Was he looking for confirmation that it had worked?
That’s when chess became fascinating to me in a completely different way. When everything else is muted, the smallest things become loud. A glance. A leg moving. A pause. Someone leaning back. A smile towards a teammate.
In badminton, I can sometimes tell an athlete is under pressure from the way they’re moving before I look at the score. In motorsport, aggression can reveal itself through the way a driver attacks a corner or fights for position. But how do you read pressure when two people are sitting almost completely still? How much are you playing the board, and how much are you playing the person?
The people behind the games
I wasn’t new to chess. I’d played casually on Chess.com and already learnt, rather painfully, that moving the piece that looks right is not quite a strategy. I’ve followed ChessBase India, watched Sagar Shah with Samay Raina, and grown up hearing names like Viswanathan Anand, Koneru Humpy, and more recently, Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Divya Deshmukh and Vidit Gujrathi.
I already respected chess's intelligence. What GCL changed for me was how I watched it. Surprisingly, a huge part of that had very little to do with my ability to understand the board. It was the commentary.
There were moments when the analysis board completely lost me. A commentator would be five possibilities down a variation while I was still wondering why we couldn’t just take the piece sitting there. But then they’d tell me something about the person.
Arjun was creating “chaos” on the board. And then, describing Bibisara Assaubayeva, they said something that stayed with me: “There’s no such thing as a position too sharp or an opponent too established for her.”
What an interesting way to understand a player. In one line, I suddenly understood how she approaches the game. The commentary wasn’t just helping me understand the board. It was helping me understand the people sitting around it.
And many of those characters weren’t actually strangers to me. I knew something of Magnus Carlsen before watching him at GCL. I knew Sagar Shah and Tania Sachdev. I recognised Nihal Sarin and Sindarov. I’d encountered these people through YouTube, interviews, clips and chess content long before I sat down to watch the league.
That made me realise something: I think sport sometimes gets backwards. You don’t always fall in love with the game first and then discover the people. Sometimes the people are what bring you into the game.
ChessBase India, Samay Raina and the wider chess media ecosystem had already done part of the work. GCL simply gave all those stories somewhere to meet. For me, that made the commentary almost as important as the chess itself. Without it, I was watching extraordinary players calculate things I couldn’t yet see. With it, I was being invited into their thinking.
A team game, too
It also made the team format far more interesting than I expected. I remember watching Nihal glance towards teammates. Little smiles appeared across tables. Players nodded at one another. Sindarov, Bibisara and the others were still fighting individual battles, but suddenly those battles meant something collectively. And I wanted more of that.
What does a GCL coach tell a team of grandmasters? How much does Nihal’s approach change because of what’s happening on another board? How do six highly individual players prepare to win together?
Even the familiar “Player of the Match” made me question something. Does a chess league need to borrow the rituals of other sporting leagues? Or, as chess grows as a spectator product, could it create more rituals that are purely its own?
I don’t know the answer. It was simply one of those things I found myself thinking about while watching.
Grand, but still close
The setting was beautiful. Bengaluru Palace for the launch ceremony, Lalit Ashok for the matches, the buggies coming in from ITC. The black-and-white details, the lighting, the production, the players. Chess already carries a certain grandeur, and GCL certainly didn’t shy away from it.
But despite all of that, it never felt like the sport was being placed further away from the viewer. I’ve watched sport become increasingly premium, with bigger hospitality, bigger sponsorship packages and bigger experiences, and sometimes accessibility can get lost somewhere along the way. Chess felt different.
The commentators laughed when the digital board initially had its little glitches. Sagar, Tania, Harshit, and the other commentators could move from serious analysis to something completely human within seconds. The people explaining the sport belonged to the same community as the people playing it.
There was expertise and grandeur, but it still felt close to the people watching.
I kept finding the story in the people
And maybe that is chess’s real opportunity. Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi can sit opposite each other carrying years of history. Nepomniachtchi can eventually beat Carlsen in the GCL final. Nihal can lose a crucial game under time pressure and return the next day to win twice. Sindarov can sit across from some of the greatest players in the sport and look completely at home.
To a chess expert, the story might be in the position. I kept finding the story in the people.
Maybe that’s because I’m not a chess expert. Maybe that’s exactly the point. I came looking for the emotion I recognise in sport: the noise, movement, aggression and release. Chess gave me all of it. It just made me look much, much closer.
About The Author
Naganethra Reddy is a former professional badminton athlete from India who now works in sustainability in sport, having worked with Formula E, Extreme E and the World Endurance Championship. She is also a member of Badminton England’s Inspire Committee and the Women’s Sport Collective Advisory Panel. Originally from Bengaluru and now based in London, she was inspired to explore chess by her brother - by just how difficult he was to beat! Having spent most of her life around sport, she is interested in what makes people watch, follow and connect with it. She writes about the Global Chess League as a relative newcomer to chess, but someone who has spent much of her life inside sport - watching it with fresh eyes and finding the stories beyond the board.
