PogChamps 4 and the fight for the future of chess | WIRED UK

Chess is booming. A heady cocktail of Queen’s Gambit mania, pandemic boredom, and Twitch streaming has given the ancient board game more visibility than it’s had in a long, long time. It’s been half a century, in fact, since the game last captured global attention so fiercely.Back in 1972, the USA’s Bobby Fischer and the USSR’s Boris Spassky engaged in a televised battle for the world championship title. The match was treated as a form of Cold War one-upmanship in miniature.There is a different kind of tussle going on in chess today: not between nations this time, but between an old guard and a new school. Some seasoned players, perceiving a mass of casual fans riding the new chess wave, worry that the game will get dumbed down for the sake of profit. Newcomers, happily ignorant of the discipline chess demands, are lapping up the fruits of their brave new world.On the many online chess portals available, they are playing classical chess alongside brand new, blasphemously untraditional formats like “King of the Hill” and “Crazyhouse”. Chess is all a bit jolly for the newcomers, in a way that the old school is liable to find flippant. Not that they don’t…
Read More