Explained

In an average year, more than 7,000 new movies are released

and over a thousand new TV shows,

thousands of new video games,

hundreds of thousands of new podcasts,

and more than 60,000 new tracks

are uploaded to Spotify every day.

Among all these options for pleasure and diversion,

the one that experienced the greatest surge in popularity in 2020

is over 1,500 years old.

A boom is taking place in chess like we have never seen.

The game is topping wish lists this holiday season,

and retailers say they're having trouble keeping it in stock.

Even internationally,

it looks like downloads for chess are up by 11%.

For a brief period, it was the most popular genre

on the streaming platform Twitch,

surpassing video games like League of Legends and Fortnite.

Thousands even tuned in to watch me play.

He blunders to H4. Logic's gonna see the checkmate, I think.

What was that? Idiot!

When I look at chess through its history,

it was considered a game that people who were very smart played.

Great leaders have been drawn to it .

And thinkers ,

and artists,

and elite athletes.

Celebrities who come to play chess in the store.

Marcel Duchamp used to come and play in this address.

Stanley Kubrick used to come and play.

But also Bobby Fischer used to come and play.

To be a good chess player, you do not have to be a genius.

I think that's a very big myth.

But chess has always been more than just a pastime.

One that transcends age, creed and culture,

but somehow never gets old.

It's fascinating. It's like escaping from your real life

into this new world of 64 squares.

So why does this ancient board game

continue to capture our imagination?

What's so special about chess?

Chess is a great game. A game and a sport for the mind.

One needs to give all one's time to it to make

the top players in the world.

I like to play chess because it's a nice game.

We now realize that anyone with a normal one of these pieces of equipment

can become a Grandmaster.

The chess-playing machine learns the best moves

by using its past experience to analyze a number of different moves.

And then selects one.

A kingdom is under attack.

The enemy's cavalry has stormed the castle.

The king already fled.

Nobody's sure where he's going,

but they'll fight until they learn he's dead.

For the first time in her life, the queen is entirely helpless.

An empire brought to its knees so spectacularly,

it's the kind of thing future generations should study.

And they have.

That's all happening on this chess board.

And this moment in this game

is the stuff of legend.

It was a beautiful game.

And to beginners, of course, it just looked miraculous.

Edward Lasker, a German engineer,

had no idea he was about to make chess history

when he got off the boat in London on that fateful day in 1912.

And his first stop was the city's top chess club.

Lasker didn't speak a word of English, but here,

it didn't matter. A man invited him to play a quick game.

Lasker didn't know it was Sir George Alan Thomas,

arguably the best player in England.

It was a casual, offhand game that happened to be recorded.

It was not in a tournament, and it was not for money.

Today, it's nicknamed "The Perfect King Hunt"

because it's so exquisitely brutal.

Or sometimes "Fatal Attraction,"

because it's beautiful at the same time.

And to really see the beauty of it,

it first helps to know how to play.

Am I teaching a six-year-old or a 20-year-old?

A six-year-old. Definitely a six-year-old.

At your disposal are eight pawns,

your foot soldiers.

The six-year-olds identify with the pawns.

They're the weakest little pieces,

but they can overcome the enemy king.

Then you have the rooks, the powerful castles.

It just goes in a straight line. It's not the most exciting piece.

Next to the rooks are your knights.

They look like…

Horsies. Everybody loves horsies, okay?

They move in an "L" shape.

- They hop around. - Kind of like a horse .

Next player is the bishop.

Very far distance. They can go from one end of the board to the other end

and attack your opponent's pieces.

Next to the bishop is your most powerful piece.

Prior to the late 15th century,

that piece only went one square.

But then a lot of powerful female leaders emerged all over Europe.

And suddenly that weak piece…

Was replaced by a queen

that could go all over the board in one move.

Without a queen, unless you are good, you might as well resign.

And then there's your most important piece of all.

The little king,

that can only go one square in any direction.

He seems like such a weakling,

but if you don't protect him, you lose the game.

In ancient Persia, they'd say,

"Shah mat,"

"The king is dead,"

which became "checkmate."

And that's it.

This is your army, same as your enemy's.

Now, you just have to make your first move.

Edward Lasker drew white pieces, which meant he would go first.

And there were 20 things he could do.

Same for Sir Thomas.

But already those two choices

could result in 400 different games.

Lasker and Thomas played this one.

A move later, the number of possible board configurations shoots up

to 71,852.

After each player makes their third move, it's around nine million.

With that many options, how do you decide what to do?

For centuries, the answer was "You're out for blood."

In the 18th century, that was considered

the only gentlemanly way to play the game.

And you attack the opponent with complete abandon,

you give away pawns at will.

We call that the Romantic era of chess.

It roughly coincided with the Romantic era in the arts.

Music, painting, poetry

focused on emotional expression rather than technical mastery.

Chess wasn't just about winning.

It was about winning beautifully.

Then Steinitz came along.

Wilhelm Steinitz,

the first official world chess champion, and he said…

"Well, this is a little crude."

Steinitz ushered in a new era,

the scientific school of chess.

Just as artists moved away from drama in favor of realism and precision,

chess players set about laying down fundamental principles of the game.

Look at these moves again.

Lasker goes for the center of the board.

Trying to control the center is principle number one.

It's the heart of the battlefield.

Then Lasker moves his knight.

That's a second principle.

Get your more powerful pieces into the action as soon as possible.

But in the opening, you're not on your own.

The great players of the past have already done a lot of the heavy lifting.

There's the Danish Gambit, the Evans Gambit.

Sicilian Defense,

the French Defense, the Ruy Lopez.

And yes, the Queen's Gambit.

Hundreds of openings have been codified,

and it helps to know some opening theory.

If your opponent knows it and you don't,

you may fall into a trap. You don't want to be in that boat.

But by move four, the number of distinct board configurations

is already at 315 billion .

Sooner or later, you have to abandon the book moves

and start fending for yourself.

The middlegame is the main fighting arena,

where plans and strategies are carried out.

The middlegame usually decides

the outcome of the game.

Lasker's bishop is out for blood.

But the triumph is short-lived.

A pawn bravely enters the bloodbath

and is instantly slaughtered.

The white queen almost had the king in her sights,

before he ducked for cover.

This was an exhilarating game for the time it was played.

Remember, this was 1912.

The scientific school was at its peak,

and chess had been transformed into something more sophisticated,

calculated, and…

boring.

But a whole new era was just about to begin.

The age of rebellion in arts, music,

politics, and chess.

Meet the hypermodernists.

They were iconoclasts,

and they said, "We're going to play differently."

Like leaving the center of the board open ,

but positioning their pieces in such a way that the center

became a death trap.

"We're not giving up the center, we're just controlling it differently."

The hypermodernists did to chess what surrealists did to art.

Taking things that seemed ordinary and reimagining their possibilities.

Nothing had to be what it seemed.

We have to keep in mind that chess is the oldest war game in history.

At the highest competitive level,

it's really a blood sport.

It's hard.

During a tournament, a chess player's blood pressure