How Computers Ruined Chess

For hundreds of years in the western world, and possibly thousands in the east, chess, in whatever form it is played, has captivated the minds of grandmasters, children, retired folks, and everyone in between. There’s a unique beauty in those 64 squares, and as one of my favorite quotes says, “Chess is the only game that is all three. Art, sport, and war.”  People like Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer, and Magnus Carlsen have drawn crowds of passionate fans wherever they choose to play, sometimes even playing dozens of people simultaneously, and winning almost all the games. Some grand masters (or experienced hustlers) would regularly sacrifice significant material for the sole purpose of experimenting, and it would lead to never-before-seen games, during which entirely new tactics were sometimes invented. Whether you are rated 600 or 3000, chess is a beautiful battlefield of mystery, adventure, and all-out mental warfare. Never will two chess games be played in the exact same way, and every game you play will unlock new “lines” to catalogue in your memory and prepare for next time. Regularly, chess becomes a battle of pattern recognition. Ladder mate, discovered attacks, pins, and other tactics formed the basis for winning games. Chess intelligence is often viewed as a mystical power, and chess grandmasters have been hailed as intellectual giants of their age since the game's inception. 

Unfortunately, though, the game of chess as we know it has been undergoing massive changes that stand to rewrite how we, as spectators of the sport, view it and how grandmasters at the top level approach the sport. In past generations, there was no real guidebook for what might be a “good” move, much less the “best” one. The game was mysterious, tactics were invented on the fly, and sometimes without much reason. Ask Bobby Fischer or Anatoly Karpov why they decided to sacrifice the rook for the knight on move 15, and usually they’ll say something along the lines of “I don’t know, just felt right”. Sometimes these gambits worked, other times they didn’t, but that’s what made chess such a thrilling game to watch and participate in. When I started playing chess, I only played against my older brother, and he played like an insane person. He doesn’t respect equal trade rules or slow tactical positions. He comes in guns blazing, sacrificing everything he could to get a tricky and confusing position. This made him a thrilling opponent and kept the game fresh and exciting. 

When grandmasters play each other, their games are slow, deliberate, and extremely tactical. Sometimes it can come down to one pawn being one square too far forward, and everything else falls because of that slight inaccuracy. I have always said chess is one of the most brutal games you can play. You could be comfortably winning for 30 moves in a row, and if you forget to protect your back rank, your game is lost in just 1 move. Grandmasters take this to another level. People like Magnus Carlsen instinctively feel tactics, often without even knowing that others study them and give them names. They can memorize the entire board and pieces and play games without ever seeing either.

Lately, though, grandmasters at the top level, even including the greatest chess player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, have started distancing themselves from the game. Magnus doesn’t compete in the world chess championship anymore; he says he doesn’t find it fun and has basically given up his world champion title. People like Hikaru Nakamura have done similar things, choosing to mainly compete in bullet chess instead. So what’s up with this? Why are chess super grandmasters stepping away from top-level competition? Is it because, as Elon Musk said, people are using anal beads to cheat? No, but almost. 

The chess world exploded in 2023 when the world champion himself accused grand master Hans Neimann of cheating. Magnus dropped out of the tournament and said I won't play if he does. The largest chess website, chess.com, published an exhaustive report about cheating in Titled Tuesdays and other online games, exposing that yes, Hans Neimann had been cheating, along with many other super GMs. Cheating has become so prevalent in online and over-the-board play that it’s difficult to view top-level play in the same way. Often, cheaters do not need to cheat every move, and just one or two engine moves are enough to confidently win a majority of games. 

It’s no secret that chess engines have gotten extremely good. Back in the 1990s, you had engines like Deep Blue rock the world when they could perform adequately against titans like Kasparov, though he often still won. Nowadays, though, even Magnus Carlsen stands no chance against Stockfish, the top chess engine.  Now, with one press of a button after every game you play, you can have the engines evaluate your play and tell you what you should have done. Already, the mystery of chess has started to vanish. There isn’t careful deliberation over months about which lines are best; you are instantly informed that the best moves are ones you would have never found, even including those super GMs. Top-level chess players think ahead several moves, but chess engines can think ahead hundreds of moves. It’s a level completely unreachable by humans, and chess has changed forever because of it. 

In the words of Magnus Carlsen on take take take podcast, “We used to be magicians on the board. And now, any idiot can sit online and go hahaha, you missed a certain engine move that you would never see in a million years. Back in the days, there were grandmasters trying to explain grandmasters' moves, and then they couldn’t understand our moves, and they were like ohhh how did they do that?... now it’s just like press a button, and there’s no mystery anymore.”   

So where does that leave us then? Is top-level human chess doomed to fall by the wayside while engines get even better, and the top players of the world entirely abandon the sport? As a dedicated chess fan, I find that future terrifying. 

As previously mentioned, people like Hikaru Nakamura and Carlsen have decided to simply avoid classical chess, that is, chess played over long periods of time, with sometimes 30 minutes to think about a single move. Instead, Nakamura has dedicated himself to speed chess, or chess played with as little as 60 seconds to complete an entire game. As you’d expect, games played this fast rarely have pinpoint accuracy and are often a game of who can control the computer mouse the best or who has the fastest reflexes. While also thrilling to watch, it’s not quite the same as a slow battle of the minds. 

As far as casual games between friends go, I can't imagine much will really change. If you understand basic chess theory, you will probably continue winning against your friends who don’t. But in top-level play, I think we will continue to see changes until the sport looks almost unrecognizable from what we once loved. We’re already seeing tournaments between chess engines, and the games are about as soulless and incomprehensible as you would imagine. It’s amazing watching Magnus instinctively dismantle his opponent through careful positioning. But chess played at engine levels is 90% of the time a draw, and in these engine tournaments, they must force the engines to make slight inaccuracies just to have a game anyone would want to watch. 

In chess’s history, the natural conclusion to a game was victory for one player or the other. Often, GMs drew games because they knew they could slip up if the game continued; now, draws seem to be the natural state of chess. There is no more waiting around for the inevitable bloodshed. In today’s games, most spectators hope to see any conflict at all. 

As we continue to see the rise of the chess engine era, many big questions remain unanswered. What will top-level competition look like going forward? Who will perform in it? What will chess organizers do to the competitions to keep people like Carlsen playing? 

Maybe chess isn’t dying. Maybe it's simply been solved enough that the illusion of mystery can’t survive anymore. The magician has been forced to reveal the trapdoor beneath the stage. We can still sit across from each other and push pawns, sacrifice our rooks, but somewhere in the background, an engine already knows who should win. It already knows exactly where the inaccuracy occurred and at which move you began to lose the thread. The mystery that once separated genius from the rest of us now lives inside a free download, and when the best move is always waiting behind an “evaluate” button, it's hard not to wonder whether we're still discovering anything at all, or if we're just verifying what the computer already knows.