The Silent Language of Chess: Why the 'Inexpressive' Label Knocks on the Wrong Door

Across the chess table, my opponent does not look at the clock, does not look at the board—he looks at my face. I understand: he is searching my eyes for that single signal that will tell him whether I am winning or losing. The board says nothing on its own. The clock speaks. And the spectator speaks—if they know the language. Sitting in that chess club in Purana Paltan, I have often felt that this silence is chess's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Because a sentence is now circulating in sports conversation: chess is supposedly the most 'inexpressive' game. A former badminton star, who now works on sports sustainability and audience engagement, has said that chess is one of the least expressive sports she has ever watched. She did not call chess bad. She said she cannot find the physical language there—the language through which a badminton rally or the speed of motorsport tells the spectator a story. I have no objection to that one sentence. My objection begins after it—when we leap from this remark to a much larger conclusion. To be clear from the start: this remark is not a technical chess analysis. It is a spectator-experience remark. And who made it matters here. She is a former badminton player who later joined the sustainability operations of Formula E, Extreme E and the World Endurance Championship. In other words, her yardstick for 'expressiveness' was built from high-speed, high-visibility sports. She learned chess herself at her brother's hand—meaning her chess eye is that of an interested beginner, not a professional analyst. Without knowing this context, we will reach the wrong conclusion. We will assume a final verdict on chess has arrived. What has actually arrived is an outsider's observation. And an outsider's observation is always useful in sports history—because they see the thing that insiders can no longer see. I have stood beside chess for nine years, especially Bangladesh's chess. I have watched from the sideline until the game became a sentence I could finally edit. I have seen that outside print and online, this game has no large window. No live TV slot, no franchise draft, no packed stadium, no broadcast rights. Here the drama comes from the board, the clock, and the budget line. So when someone says chess is 'inexpressive', I think—yes, physically, correct. But on the storytelling side? The arithmetic runs the other way. Physically, chess is less expressive—this is a design truth, nothing to deny. In badminton, a player's fatigue, leaps and shouts during a rally are all visible. In motorsport, the speed and the sound of tyres tell the spectator. In chess, the player sits. The room is silent. Twenty minutes may pass before a single move. A spectator who does not know the engine evaluation bar cannot actually tell who is ahead. This is a real, long-standing barrier for chess—and it is not new. But this is where the error happens, where we blend two different things—physical expressiveness and watchability. These two are not the same variable. Chess lost physical language, but in its place it built proxy channels of expression. The engine evaluation bar, live commentary, reaction cameras, streaming personality—together these show on the screen what the board cannot show. When a broadcaster like Hikaru Nakamura breaks the silence of blitz and pulls the audience inside, that is chess's own language—not physical, but not expressionless either. I felt this myself in 2026, when I sat indoors during lockdown watching chess migrate online. The stadiums were empty, but the servers were full. Three Dhaka-based International Masters were playing blitz at two in the morning, because the board was the only room still open. That was when I understood that chess's emotion had spilled outside the board—onto screens, into chats, into rating updates. That same period I learned that the Bangladesh Chess Federation's entire annual government grant is roughly 11 lakh taka—less than a single franchise cricketer's bat deal. From that night I imposed a rule on myself: every emotional piece must contain at least one number that would embarrass an administrator. The best columns have to be built like a rehab plan: small steps, honest pain, no shortcuts. And the real driver of watchability was never physical expressiveness. It was stakes, story and accessibility. The reason football World Cups pull viewers into the final eight minutes is not speed, it is that this is a story whose ending nobody knows. Chess's problem is the same—the story exists, but the machinery to translate it for the spectator is not everywhere. Inside the chess world this debate keeps returning in another shape—around draw rates and short draws. Some tournaments introduce rules like the 'Sofia Rules', so that no agreed draw is allowed before a set move. The chess world is itself aware of the watchability question—but outsider criticism does not connect to that debate. In Bangladesh's context this becomes even clearer. There is no chess broadcast here, so the 'inexpressive' debate is almost irrelevant here. Our problem lies elsewhere. In the Premier Division Chess League, Police, Navy, Biman and the bank teams hire Indian grandmasters to sit on guest boards. In 2026 I was there for two weeks, spending Qatar World Cup evenings in a Purana Paltan tea stall with arbiters and club secretaries. I saw that chess here runs on favours, not contracts. And those favours have a price no one accounts for. A Kolkata-based grandmaster joined a bank side—the reported fee was about 1.5 lakh taka. I reported that news first, but before filing I verified it with two rivals. Because the fear of being wrong still chases me. Our mistake is right here: we treat this as a watchability crisis, when it is a survival crisis. Without physical expressiveness, chess does not stop working. But without funding, without a pipeline, chess does stop working—whether or not that is visible. Parents rationally steer their children toward engineering, because chess here is an uncertain path. This is not a moral failure, it is an arithmetic—and the arithmetic runs against us. Now to the point where the outsider remark loses its own weight. From 'inexpressive' to 'unwatchable'—this leap is far bigger than the evidence. Behind this claim there is no audience research, no retention data, no viewership figure. It is one person's viewing experience arriving at a general conclusion. Yet the audience growth chess saw from 2026 to 2026 says almost the opposite—watchability comes from story and accessibility, not from physical movement. I think the real value of such outsider remarks is not attack, but mirror. They show us where an ordinary spectator gets stuck. They cannot tell who is winning. That is not chess's fault, it is chess's lack of translation. The eval bar, commentary, player-centred coverage—these three do that translation. Where a tournament supplies all three, chess is not silent. But there is a danger we must watch. If, in the name of watchability, we shrink chess's own nature—short formats, artificial gimmicks, chopped-up games—we will save the body and lose the soul. This risk cuts both ways. Confusing physical expressiveness with watchability means depriving the game of its own language. Another thing gets buried in this discussion. In Bangladesh the problem is not that chess is unpleasant to watch. The problem is that nobody knows who runs the board, because nobody is watching. Ziaur Rahman died of a heart attack mid-game on 5 July 2026—the country's most decorated player, a fifteen-time national champion. Before his death I had emailed four times since 2026 for an interview. The fifth email was a condolence—I filed it standing outside the hall. Five months later, in December, fourteen-year-old Manon Reja Neer won the National Championship undefeated. I shaped the two events into one piece. The distance between those two events is our real story—not a debate about expressiveness, but a debate about inheritance. This is why I never write a 'next Niaz' headline. Because that is a false promise—and our country has burned many players with false promises. Niaz Murshed was South Asia's first grandmaster, a year before Viswanathan Anand. Yet India built more than eighty grandmasters, while we still count five. The gap created when the school-chess pipeline was shut in 2026 cannot be filled by any eval bar. And that gap is the real indicator, not the comfort of a spectator's eye. So is chess 'inexpressive'? Physically—yes. In storytelling terms—absolutely not. The chess board is silent, but the bigger truth is that we often do not want to listen to that silence. The question is not whether chess is pleasant to watch. The question is—who will pay for this board, and who will teach the next generation that a story can live inside silence too.