Chess and the "Least Expressive" Question: When a Former Badminton Athlete Reframes the Spectator Problem

A chess game makes no sound. There is no squeaking of shoes on the pitch, no leap, no moment when an athlete falls to the touchline and forces herself back up amid the roar. A football match broadcasts ninety minutes of moving images; a chess game broadcasts three hours of hands placing pieces and eyes fixed on a board. When Naganethra Reddy — a former badminton athlete now working in sport sustainability — wrote that chess is "one of the least expressive sports," she was not talking about the move. She was talking about what the camera cannot capture. That is the starting point of a debate that has simmered inside the chess industry for years, but has rarely been put on the table by someone from another sport. Naganethra Reddy is not a chess player. Born in Bengaluru and now based in London, she competed in badminton before moving into the sports industry, with roles spanning badminton, Formula E, Extreme E, the WEC endurance series, and sustainability. Her only point of contact with chess, by her own account, is her brother — whom she describes as "very difficult to beat." That is an amateur, family frame of reference, not a view from the top of competitive play. So when she calls chess "inexpressive," the claim must be read for what it is. It is not a statement about a player's strength, nor a technical judgment about a specific game. It is a claim about watchability — about what a person sitting outside the screen actually feels while following a game of chess. Within the chess industry, this is a real fault line. For decades, organisers have argued over draw rates, over short draws, over whether to adopt the Sofia rules — which forbid draw offers before a certain number of moves — or whether tournaments should finish with rapid and blitz to add drama. A four-hour draw in which the first thirty moves are identical across every tournament is a television problem, not a chess problem. What is striking is that the context in which this claim appears runs counter to the general trend. Chess is in a period of strong growth on online platforms. Sites such as Chess.com and Lichess have recorded surging player numbers in recent years, especially after the pandemic. Live streams by leading players — Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura — draw tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers. At times, an online chess stream has drawn more viewers than a match in many traditional sports. So why does a sports professional still find chess "inexpressive"? The answer lies here: growth in the number of players does not mean growth in the number of viewers in the way a broadcast sport measures it. These are two different curves, and Reddy's claim accidentally lands exactly in the gap between them. A person can play chess every day and never watch someone else's game. That is the central paradox of this sport. To understand why chess is called "inexpressive," the concept of expression must be split into two layers. The first is physical expression — what the eye plainly sees: speed, explosiveness, the movement of the body. Badminton, Reddy's own sport, is a sport of continuous physical expression: leaps, lunges, racquet speeds that can exceed 400 km/h on a smash. In this layer, chess is close to zero. Two players sit facing each other, their bodies almost motionless for most of the time. The camera can only record hands, faces, and a static board. The second layer is structural expression — what is not immediately visible but can be read if you know how: the shifting balance of power on the board, latent threats, abandoned plans, spaces created and then filled. In this layer, chess is intensely expressive — but only to someone trained to read it. And that is precisely the problem: structural expression demands prior knowledge from the viewer, while physical expression does not. A child who has never watched badminton still knows when a shot is beautiful. Someone who has never played chess will not know when a move is brilliant. I was once pushed out into the corridor at the 2026 AFC Cup and learned something about reading a match from what others leave behind: the value of a moment lies not in whether it is loud or silent, but in whether you have the tools to decode it. A sideways pass in the seventieth minute of a football match can carry more tactical intent than a spectacular shot — but the casual fan remembers the shot, not the sideways pass. Chess is the extreme version of that principle: almost all of its value sits in the layer the naked eye cannot see. Here, I believe in the diagram, but I believe more in the space between diagrams. In chess, that space is the most fascinating part — and also the most invisible to a new viewer. This is where the chess industry already has a technical answer, and it deserves credit. The Eval Bar — a computer evaluation bar showing the balance of a position in real time — is one of the most important broadcast innovations in this game over the past two decades. It turns structural expression into visual expression: when the bar suddenly leaps from balanced to heavily tilted to one side, viewers who do not understand the move still sense that something has just happened. Professional commentators, interactive live streams, behind-the-scenes stories about players — all are layers designed to lower the entry threshold for casual viewers. In other words, the chess industry does not deny the problem Reddy raises. It has been addressing it, just with different tools than physical sports use. The issue is not that chess lacks expression, but that chess needs a converter — and that converter is not the body, but technology and storytelling. Here is the point most analyses of this topic miss: chess does not have an expression problem, it has a signal problem. In sports-communication research, a sport needs three things to hold an audience: a visual signal that a key moment is coming, an audio signal that it has happened, and a story to make viewers care about the outcome. Football has all three: a hush before the shot, a roar when the ball hits the net, and the story of the team. Chess has the story, but lacks the first two signals. The Eval Bar is a visual signal, but it is slow and abstract. Chess has no roar. I remember once rewatching a famous game three times in a row, the way I rewatch a big football match. The first time, I followed the flow. The second, I focused on the structure as one side attacked. The third, I looked at what happened when the tide turned. Only on the third pass did I see what people call the beautiful moment of the game — and it was not in the final move, but in an intermediate move the coverage never mentioned. That is evidence that the problem is not that chess lacks beautiful moments, but that its most beautiful moments lie where the camera does not point. This is especially notable in the Indian context, where chess is undergoing an unprecedented wave. India's young generation of players, led by names rising into the world's top ranks, has turned chess from an intellectual pastime into a national sport with an audience. Tournaments held in India attract media and sponsor attention at a level no one could have imagined a decade ago. And yet, at the very heart of that wave, the question of watchability remains unresolved. But there is one point both camps overlook. The debate over whether chess is "inexpressive" is usually placed on the wrong axis. People compare chess to football, badminton, athletics — sports where the drama lies in the body. But if chess is placed next to its true peers — sports decided by decisions rather than movement, such as archery, shooting, and to some degree golf — the picture changes entirely. Archery is also nearly motionless, also has internal drama, and also needs commentary for viewers to understand. So why is archery not called "inexpressive"? Because archery has a clear visual moment: the arrow leaves the string, flies, and lands in the target. Chess lacks that moment. The decisive move in a chess game can look identical to a probing move — the same hand, the same piece, the same placing gesture. That is the real blind spot: chess does not lack drama, it lacks a visual signal to mark the drama. And this is where Reddy's claim, though it comes from an outside view, lands on a truth the chess world sometimes avoids: a sport can have millions of players and still not have millions of viewers if it cannot solve the signal problem. Rising player numbers do not automatically convert into audiences. This is a lesson football solved long ago, and chess is still solving. It is worth adding that short draws are not merely an aesthetic issue. They are a rational tactical decision in a round-robin setting, when a player needs to conserve energy for decisive games. But to a viewer, a fifteen-move draw is a product that cannot be sold. This is precisely why leading tournaments are shifting toward hybrid formats: classical for depth, rapid and blitz for drama. Events such as Norway Chess have applied anti-short-draw rules to force players to fight to the end. These are efforts to redesign the spectator experience, and they show that the chess industry understands the problem better than any outside claim can see. Going back to my own experience: when I follow a football match, I spend thirty percent of my time looking at the areas without the ball. Chess is the same. A good viewer does not look at the piece being moved, but at the pieces that are not — the ones threatening, the ones waiting. The problem is that no lens automatically points at those pieces. The Eval Bar is one solution, but it only shows who is ahead, not why. The "why" still has to be told by a human. Yet the weight of this claim must be recalibrated. It comes from someone with an amateur chess background, whose frame of reference is family games. It is not the analysis of an industry expert, but a data point on how sports professionals outside chess see the game. Its value lies there: a signal from outside, worth hearing, but not to be used as a yardstick for the entire industry. If a wave of sports figures outside chess make similar claims, that would be a signal worth worrying about. A single voice is just a single voice. In the end, what is worth pondering is not whether chess is expressive, but whether the chess industry has built enough tools for outsiders to feel that expression. The greatest games in history were never silent to those who understood them. The remaining task is to make that inner noise audible to more people.