Chess and the 'Least Expressive' Question: The Watchability Debate Seen from Vietnamese Sport

Chess is one of the least expressive sports. That claim did not come from a grandmaster, a national-team coach or a chess federation official. It came from Naganethra Reddy, a former badminton athlete originally from Bengaluru, India, now living and working in London, United Kingdom. She works professionally in sport sustainability, with experience across electric and endurance racing properties including Formula E, Extreme E and WEC. Her background is exactly what makes the statement worth examining. In badminton, every effort a player makes is visible to the audience: the jumps, the lunges to save a shuttle, the speed of the racket swing, the heavy breathing after a long rally. Chess is the complete opposite. Two players sit facing each other, almost motionless, and the entire drama unfolds inside their heads. For someone coming from a world of constant movement, feeling that chess is inexpressive is almost a natural reaction. What matters is that the statement makes no claim about chess quality. No game was dissected, no opening was analysed, no Elo rating and no win-draw percentage for any player was cited. The category the speaker is addressing is entirely different: the viewer experience. In other words, this is an aesthetic and watchability judgement, not a statement about competitive strength. Naganethra Reddy is not a member of the professional chess community. She has never held a title within the international chess system, nor has she competed in any officially rated event. Her relationship with the 64-square board is personal and recreational: she began exploring chess through her brother, whom she describes as very difficult to beat. That detail matters when positioning the value of the statement. When a recreational player says chess is inexpressive, they are describing their own experience as a spectator, not issuing a technical conclusion. Her sporting credibility, by contrast, is real: a former badminton athlete who moved into sustainability work and has collaborated with large international events. This is the interesting intersection. Reddy understands very well what a watchable sport looks like, because badminton, Formula E and WEC are all designed for real-time viewing, with explosive moments that land instantly. Yet she approaches chess only at amateur level, where the experience usually stops at watching two people sit in silence over a board. The gap between those two experiences is the core of the debate. From a technical standpoint, chess has one of the densest decision loads of any head-to-head sport. Across a game lasting four to five hours, each player may make dozens of critical decisions, and every one of them can lead to a win, a draw or a loss. The problem is that those decisions make no sound, produce no movement, and to a non-expert audience they are essentially invisible. Still, calling chess inexpressive is imprecise. Chess expression exists; it simply lives in micro-signals rather than in muscle. A player pressing a hand to the forehead, eyes resting a moment longer than usual on a single square, fingers tapping the table, a long exhale when the clock drops to a few minutes, standing up to pace around the board when the position is stretched to breaking point. To insiders these are as clear as a powerful smash at the back of the court. Chess's problem is not a lack of expression but that its expression does not automatically translate into information for the viewer. In football, a shot against the crossbar makes an entire stadium hold its breath with no explanation needed. In chess, the best move of the game can pass before millions of eyes unnoticed unless someone points it out. This is the fundamental difference between a sport of movement and a sport of cognition. Notably, the world's leading players are acutely aware of this gap. They are not silent in the literal sense. At elite events you still see players clutching their heads, striking the table after missing a chance, or sitting motionless for long minutes over a difficult position. But those moments only carry meaning when the viewer already understands the context. Without that context, they see only two people sitting still. The debate about chess expressiveness is therefore really a debate about mass-audience appeal. This is not a new problem. For decades, chess organisers have been trying to answer one question: how does a sport played in silence keep viewers watching? The answer has never been to change the nature of the sport, but to change how it is delivered. In Vietnam, that question is familiar. Chess is one of the sports where Vietnam has genuinely proud international results, yet it is also one of the hardest to convert into mass viewership. Elite games involving Vietnamese players at international events are typically followed by a loyal core of fans rather than generating the broad reach of football, badminton or volleyball. The reason is not a lack of achievement. Vietnamese chess has produced world-class players. Le Quang Liem, born on March 13, 2026 in Ho Chi Minh City, rose into the ranks of international grandmasters and reached his peak by winning the World Blitz Championship in 2026 in Moscow. For years he was Vietnam's number one, crossed the 2700 Elo mark and appeared at events gathering the strongest players on the planet. Alongside him is Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, born on February 23, 2026 in Can Tho, who earned the international grandmaster title in 2026 at just 14 years old, becoming a sensation of Vietnamese chess. The next generation includes Tran Tuan Minh, while the women's field has produced names such as Pham Le Thao Nguyen and Nguyen Thi Mai Hung, who have brought home numerous medals for the national team. Regionally and continentally, Vietnamese chess is a regular presence at the SEA Games and the Asian Games with consistent results. SEA Games 31, hosted in Hanoi in 2026, included chess in the official programme, giving domestic audiences direct access to leading players. International opens such as the HDBank Cup in Ho Chi Minh City have become annual fixtures attracting many international grandmasters. The paradox is this: Vietnamese chess has results, has world-class players, and hosts international tournaments at home, yet its media coverage and audience pull still lag well behind its potential. This is precisely where Naganethra Reddy's remark, despite coming from an outsider's perspective, touches a real issue. Most Vietnamese chess fans follow the sport through international online platforms, where they can watch live, analyse positions and discuss with a global community. The growth of these platforms has created a new, younger generation of viewers more accustomed to following chess on a laptop or phone than on television. That suggests the problem lies not in the sport itself but in how the sport is told. When a game is delivered with commentary, positional analysis, move evaluation and player storytelling, audiences of any level can follow and feel the tension. When all that is offered is footage of two people sitting in silence, even chess lovers struggle. One of the most important innovations in chess over the past decade is the engine evaluation bar, commonly known as the Eval Bar. It is a graphic strip showing the balance of a position in real time, helping non-expert viewers immediately grasp who is ahead and how serious each move is. The tool has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for chess on television and online platforms. Alongside it has come a professional commentary corps capable of translating the language of the board into a story viewers can feel. They explain why a seemingly harmless move is dangerous, why a player accepts a sacrifice, and why a balanced position can be more tense than a full-scale attack. Young Vietnamese players are adapting to this trend as well. Many take part in online platforms, playing blitz and bullet in front of audiences, interacting directly with viewers and building personal brands. This is the path world chess has already taken, and Vietnam is gradually catching up. Another factor often raised in discussions about chess appeal is tournament format. Classical games lasting many hours can contain enormous strategic depth but struggle to hold a mass audience. Blitz and bullet, by contrast, generate faster tempo, more mistakes and more explosive moments, though purists consider them less calculating. The draw rate is also contested. At elite events, many games end in draws, especially when neither player wants to take risks. To a general audience, a draw often feels like an incomplete result, even when it may technically be a high-quality game with precision down to the smallest detail. For that reason, some international tournaments have experimented with rules designed to limit short draws and encourage sharper play. These experiments show that chess organisers understand the audience problem is existential, not merely aesthetic. Returning to Naganethra Reddy's statement, it should be placed in its proper position. It is the personal view of someone from the world of physical sport, who approaches chess at recreational level and sees the game through the lens of a general sports fan. It is not a technical conclusion, nor a claim about chess quality. The value of the statement lies in reflecting a real sentiment among part of the sports audience. Many people who love football, badminton or athletics feel something similar when they first watch chess: they do not understand what is happening, and because they do not understand, they find it boring. That feeling is genuine, even though its cause lies not in the sport but in how the sport is delivered. For Vietnamese chess, this can be a useful prompt. Rather than arguing over whether chess is expressive, the more practical question is how to let domestic audiences feel the depth of the game. That requires investment in commentary, content production, player storytelling, and bringing chess closer to younger audiences through digital platforms. More broadly, chess history shows the sport has repeatedly been predicted to struggle for audiences, and has repeatedly proved otherwise. The surge of chess on online platforms in recent years, along with a generation of young players with major media influence, shows the game's appeal has never dried up. The issue is purely the channel. So the claim that chess is one of the least expressive sports should be read as a signal about viewer experience, not as a verdict on the game of intellect. It reminds us that in an era when attention is the scarcest resource, even the deepest sports must learn to tell their story more clearly. For Vietnam, where chess has a deep record of achievement and internationally rated players, this is an opportunity rather than only a challenge. With better delivery, chess can become a widely followed sport, not only within the playing community but among the general sports public. When that happens, the debate about expressiveness will answer itself.