Whatever happened to chess?

I remember the Fischer-Spassky games in the early '70s. This was the championship, American versus Russian, and the games were broadcast live on PBS as they happened. There was this local New York chess player, Shelby Lyman, who stood in front of a big chess board on the wall, and after every move, he'd comment and show alternate moves and whatnot. Which may sound like the most boring thing in the universe, but somehow, if you knew even just the tiniest bit about chess, it was fascinating. Chess, for a little while, was front page news. Chess books sold like crazy (and I bought a few and, as an editor, worked on a few), chess clubs saw their memberships grow, and in general, chess was cool, and everybody was doing it.

Not so much anymore.

There's two things going on, I think. First, there's the game itself, which has an awful lot of new competition from video games. There is just so much game time in the day, and today's kids simply have more to choose from. Not that many won't choose chess, but the competition is stiff. And second, there's the institutional aspects of the game, which seem to be in disarray. If you want to attract new players on the local level, you need star players on the national and international level, and at the moment, those stars aren't there.

But they may be coming. How America Forgot About Chess explains how we got to this state of inertia, and how a few young players on the scene today may be potential breakthroughs.

Chess will, unquestionably, survive its competition and its organizational disarray. Its roots go back 1500 years, and the game as we know it today is centuries old. And you don't have to upgrade whenever a new console is released. But will it ever be as popular as it was when it was a Fischer-Spassky analog to the Cold War? Probably not.
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