Speed, Spectacle, and the Strange New Future of Chess

No game has changed more slowly than chess. And no world has changed more quickly than esports. So the idea of chess—the original slow burn of the human mind—joining the Esports World Cup in 2025 feels, at first, like someone trying to serve tea at a Formula 1 pitstop. Yet here we are. Chess will debut at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh this July, joining a line-up otherwise crowded with games involving lasers, loot, and constant death. The format? Rapid time control: 10 minutes per player, no increment. The reward? A $1.5 million prize pool, the largest ever earmarked for a single chess esports event.

It is easy to see why chess was invited. After all, the game has spent the last five years mutating into an online creature—boosted first by pandemic boredom, then by Twitch streamers like Hikaru Nakamura, then by Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. By 2024, chess wasn’t just something elderly men played in parks; it was something teenagers watched at the same tab as Fortnite.

But bringing chess to the Esports World Cup does more than crown its digital stardom. It accelerates the anxious question that has haunted the chess world for a while now: what is chess becoming?

For India, this question carries extra weight. India is sending a proper team into the Riyadh event: Grandmasters Arjun Erigaisi, Nihal Sarin, and Aravindh Chithambaram. Erigaisi, notably, has been signed by Gen.G Esports, a heavyweight in the gaming world. Sarin and Chithambaram will represent S8UL, the Mumbai-based esports giant making its first foray into chess. For a country that produced its 84th grandmaster this month—and has a generation of teenagers playing at 2700 Elo levels—the allure of the esports arena is obvious.

This is a generation that grew up online. Erigaisi, Sarin, Chithambaram: all three have played more rapid and blitz games online than many of their predecessors played classical games in their entire careers. They are native to the speed and spectacle that esports demand. They know how to win and how to entertain while doing it—both necessary currencies in a world where games are judged not only by the result but by how they look in a highlight reel.

But the move is not without its ironies. Traditional chess—the soul-bruising, six-hour classical kind—does not fit easily into the world of energy drinks and instant replays. Classical chess is about slow violence: a single pawn move that takes 40 minutes of thought, a queen trapped two hours later by an idea hatched before lunch. Esports, by contrast, rewards flash and relentlessness. Chess at the Esports World Cup will be faster, sharper, louder. Silent calculation will not be enough; players will need swagger, too.

The problem is that when chess moves at the speed of esports, certain invisible things are lost: the deep muscles of calculation, the patience to outlast boredom, the strange beauty of a position slowly, agonisingly clarified. Already, FIDE has expressed some disquiet: the Esports World Cup’s chess event is organised independently, without direct FIDE involvement. Governance issues loom. There are questions about formats, rating implications, even the philosophical direction of what counts as “competitive chess”. The Freestyle Chess revolution—Magnus Carlsen’s venture into randomised starting positions—has widened the fault lines: greeted with applause by some and quiet alarm by others. Each new attempt to entertain feels, to purists, like one more crack in the ancient, disciplined edifice of chess.

If esports chess becomes the dominant arena—more lucrative, more visible—there is a risk that classical training gets cannibalised by blitz instincts. What used to be the art of endurance becomes a game of reflexes. What used to be an apprenticeship stretching across years becomes a six-month sprint to social media fame.

To be fair, Erigaisi and Sarin seem clear-eyed about it. They know that the Candidates Tournament, the World Cup, and the Olympiad are still the real tournaments that define legacies. In interviews, they insist that esports chess is a supplement, not a replacement. But markets have a way of bending trajectories. The moment streaming bonuses outstrip tournament winnings, and esports rankings deliver more sponsorships than Elo points, the ecosystem shifts—and not always in favour of the long game.

Then there is the simple matter of attention. In classical chess, a ten-move stretch of positional manoeuvring—where “nothing happens” for twenty minutes—is where greatness is often born. In esports chess, a ten-second pause risks losing half the viewership. The logic of the platform is unforgiving. The incentive is always to move faster, take more risks, generate more drama.

Chess as spectacle is not new. Bobby Fischer made it theatrical. Kasparov made it gladiatorial. Magnus Carlsen made it viral. But spectacle always existed inside the larger architecture of classical chess. Now, spectacle threatens to become the architecture itself.

The Esports World Cup will be a dazzling show. India’s players will almost certainly shine. There will be thrilling games, brilliant tactics, viral moments. But the real battle will happen offstage: whether chess, in trying to survive the twenty-first century, forgets why it mattered in the first place.

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