Now is the Winter of our Shit Content

Game 10 of the World Chess Championship may not have produced great chess... but sure it deserves better content?

Look, I get it. It’s difficult to cover a sporting event in which 14 matches are played over 18 days and in which, on many of the days, the result is a perfunctory draw. Add into the mix the fact that a perfunctory draw can still drag out over a couple of hours and you create a media landscape where there is not a lot to say and a lot of time to say it in. Never has so much been said about so little by so few.

Game 10 was the most perfunctory of perfunctory draws. Ian Nepomniachtchi returned to the Petroff in response to Carlsen’s e4. This was not about looking for edges in the game and all about consolidation. In the end, the game was drawn at the earliest opportunity short of three-fold repeating.

How do you cover a game of chess under these conditions? Carlsen has a three-point lead going into the final four games. His opponent is scrambling desperately to avoid a total collapse. A run-of-the-mill draw is made. And you have hours of coverage, a YouTube video’s-worth of content or a column to fill.

After the chess, the second most talked-about aspect of the World Chess Championship has been the coverage. It began with “Has there ever been a better provision for a chess audience in the history of chess?” and quickly devolved into “Why do we even have press conferences anyway?”

Of course, that sports personalities can reveal nothing interesting in post-game pressers should come as a shock to no one—not least in a sport where knowledge is, to a large extent, power. What has been more surprising has been the complete lack of guile displayed in press conferences by the participants in attempting to salvage something from them.

There seem to have been two approaches to the conundrum. On the one hand, the interviewers have engaged in a race to the bottom, each one attempting to outdo their predecessor in asking wildly inappropriate questions. This reached a nadir with Nepomniachtchi being asked about whether or not he cut his hair to show his shame. On the other hand, there was *that* question from Andrea Botez which revealed at least a self-awareness about the ridiculous levels to which the questioning had sunk… but did very little to attempt to raise the levels.

What is the solution? Perhaps we should have taken heed of Carlsen’s own invocation in a press conference of the maxim “If you can’t say anything good… don’t say anything at all”. That won’t work for those who work at the content mills, perhaps, but there are questions to be raised about the frequency of the press conferences. Maybe the press conferences should have been reduced, moved to the morning before the games got underway, and players simply been subjected to the immediate post-game interviews where they are questioned by one person with a focus on the gameplay? This was closer to what we saw in London 2018.

But there is a wider point here. In many respects, the chess media is in its infancy. This is a strange thing to say of a sport that has existed far longer than most. But what we have witnessed in the last few years is the emergence of chess into the spotlight. Where the chess media was previously provisioning a niche audience of largely expert amateur players, the hinterland now looks very different. The Queens Gambitification of chess has opened the sport up to a new breed of consumer: the casual fan.

Obviously, read through this lens, the teething problems that have been in evidence during this match can be forgiven somewhat. It was unlikely that we were going to nail it the first time around. But it is important that we don’t simply accept the current situation as a reality.

Media coverage is a curiously evolving phenomenon. It takes time to learn how best to present a sport to an audience. You need to learn what works, what doesn’t work, the sorts of pundits who go down well with audiences (and the sorts of pundits who don’t).

It should also be said that we should be ready to unlearn things too. Just because we’ve always done a thing a certain way doesn’t mean we should continue in perpetuity. Sometimes it feels like elements of the media forget this when they’re intoning long strings of notation.

But there is a two-way responsibility here too. The audience isn’t a passive entity that remains constant while you experiment. There will be many people who are coming to the World Chess Championship—chess itself—for the first time. Their opinion of chess is being shaped by the media through which they are experiencing it.

There is a seriousness here, then. This audience may not always be with us to the end of the age. But there should be a positivity here, too. We have every opportunity to embrace this potential audience and induct them into the same breed of infectiousness towards the game that we feel.

So here we are: at the foothills of a new era of chess. Now is the winter of our shit content. But the spring is coming.