Chess Personalities & Voting

I loved chess as a kid. I would take my set to my sister’s ballet practice, and some very kind, very patient ballerinas would play with me before their own classes.

Then I stopped. I’m not sure exactly why. I suspect, unfortunately, that the acquisition of a Gameboy and Kirby’s Dreamland (and, later, Pokemon Blue) had something to do with it. It became hard to ask other people to play a game. There’s probably something there about growing up and the realization of the self-in-public, but that’s for another time.

I got back into chess (online) at the start of the pandemic, and again over the last year. I purchased a Chess.com subscription so I can get game reviews. I play a daily rated 10-minute game with breakfast, and I do puzzles and lessons in my downtime.

I make this clear: I am not good at chess. I am hovering around 740 Elo (a decent “expert” rating is 2000). I have learned a handful openings. I have just begun to stop thinking of “playing chess” really and more “playing” a specific opening or defense. My playstyle, such as it is, is not exciting; I like the London System because it’s easy and the Caro-Kann for the same reasons.

This isn’t about chess. This is about chess personalities.

Looking to improve my game, I went to Youtube. And let me tell you, people are playing chess over there. Lots of chess.

One of the most exciting players to watch is Hikaru Nakamura. He’s a Japanese American Grand Master, a child prodigy, 5-time U.S. Champion, a prominent streamer, and one of the best rapid and blitz chess in the world.

He’s also very fun to watch.

Nakamura started streaming in 2018, and he’ll often play blitz chess with crazy handicaps. Think: playing without a queen or no pawns, that kind of thing. In the middle of a game, he’ll sometimes pontificate about stock trading, a kind bro-ish financial advisor (less cool than chess, but okay).

To follow what Nakamura is doing when he plays, it helps if you know a little about the game. Some opening theory.

But it doesn’t help that much. He’s too fast. Like any true savant, his expertise is hard to appreciate if you aren’t an expert yourself.  

The good news is you don’t even need to know the different pieces to get some entertainment out of it.

You might have an image in your mind of a chess master, probably Garry Kasparov looking stern, or Anya Taylor-Joy looking severe and stylized in The Queen’s Gambit or, perhaps, the kid from Searching for Bobby Fischer. All of them are creatures of the intellect, impenetrable in their calculations. Versions of Spock. 

Not Nakamura. The guy pushes his lips out when in deep thought. He appears consistently, handsomely half-shaven. He leans back and scratch his beard before deciding on a key move. He ruffles his hair. He looks at the ceiling and taps his chin.

Everything online is an act, we are all become digital masks, sure, sure. But this seems genuine.

Nakamura thinks out loud. He plans out his moves in advance on screen, drawing arrows to map out the captures before they happen.

“I’ll go here,” he says in one video. “Because I don’t want to think too hard.”

When he is not thinking too hard, he has still calculated something like a dozen moves in advance. The screen is full of arrows; it’s a drunken football coach’s complicated Hail Mary play, planned out in excruciating and nonsensical detail.

He narrates the way a game will go in a way that makes sense only to him.

Nakamura will say something like, “Takes here, captures, captures, captures, captures, takes, takes back, then push, then takes, check, takes, check, moves here.” Then he’ll pause and cock his head like a man trying, on good faith, to ascribe meaning to a first-year art student’s Jackson Pollock homage. “Right?”

Mere genius-level chess would be impressive. But watching somebody lean forward and squint and laugh at themselves even as they appear to look into the future through sheer mastery of a game? Watching Nakamura’s chess streams is fun.

Crucially: Nakamura is not the best chess player.

You have probably heard of Magnus Carlsen, the current World Chess Champion. His accomplishments, like Nakamura’s, are too many to list without it being ridiculous. He has the highest ever Elo rating at 2882. He is playing a long game; that is, he is always playing for his career. He utilizes different openings not just to win individual games, but to make it harder for opponents to predict his moves and train against him in the future.

Nakamura and Carlsen have a bit of rivalry, as you might expect. When they play each other, chess fans lose their minds. And Nakamura has his wins. Just this year (2024), Nakamura once beat Carlsen on time—that is, Carlsen let his clock run down.

But Carlsen has more wins. A lot more.

It’s complicated to get into. We can talk about different time constraints and settings and how chess tournaments aren’t about winning one game but a number of games. We can talk about tie-breaker “Armageddon chess,” where the black pieces start with less time but win if the game is a draw.

But the short version is this: overall, Carlsen has won more of their games than Nakamura, by a pretty good margin.

And Carlsen is so, so boring.

I don’t mean, like, as a guy. I’m sure he’s fine. His playing, certainly, is known to be very exciting—as previously mentioned, he has some subtle, unexpected moves. He’s known to be very aggressive. And he has other stuff going on. Carlsen appeared in The Simpsons. He was featured as one of the sexiest men alive in a 2017 issue of Cosmo.

But watching him, not the board, seems pretty…bland.

A young chess streamer, Anna Cramling, got the chance to play Carlsen in 2020. Cramling takes video, of course; she is a Grand Master in her own right and the child of two GMs. She is also firmly Gen Z; she is extremely popular on Twitch, like millennial Nakamura. There is no doubt, really, that she’ll lose against the World Champ, but she is delighted to be there.

She asks Carlsen if he’ll say hi to the stream. He looks disinterestedly at the camera as if seeing it for the first time and says, simply, no.

Carlsen is mostly quiet through the rest of the game. He says that Cramling is playing well. Better than he would like, he dead-pans. It doesn’t quite land.

At one point, inevitably, Cramling in painted into a corner. She knows she will lose material.

“Look for tactics,” says Carlsen.

Which is a nice thing to say. Who wouldn’t want a tip from the World Champ? What a story!

It’s also about as useful as a basketball guru saying, “Dribble better” or “Put it in the net, why don’t you?”

When Carlsen beat Nakamura in 2020, he praised his opponent by saying simply, “he made it very difficult for me.”

C’mon, buddy. Watch an MMA press conference and come back with something better than that!

It’s striking. Nakamura, the No. 2 player is, hands down, the one you want to watch. Maybe if I were grandmaster, I’d have a better appreciation for Carlsen’s play. But Nakamura’s face is the more compelling one. The curiosity, the wonder, the emotion, the laughter. It’s like he’s having a beer with the chessboard.

Watching Carlsen, you almost want to quit chess. What’s the point? You’re never going to be as good as this guy. Cramling sure isn’t, not even close, and she started playing when she was three years old.

Watching Nakamura, you want to try out some zany opening just to fuck with the other player. You want to do something stupidly ambitious and sit back and chuckle while your opponent wonders if you’re a rank amateur or maybe, just maybe, there’s a trap they can’t see. Maybe there is! Maybe you haven’t seen it yet, either!

This isn’t to say anything of these men’s character. They both seem fine! Nakamura has contributed to ACTBlue and plenty of great charities. Carlsen played in a tournament for UNICEF. And so on. Anyway, who knows what they’re like when the pieces are put away and the cameras are off?

But Nakamura sure knows when the camera is off, and when it’s on.

I feel self-conscious about this. They both have endless videos and how-tos on Youtube, on Chess.com, on personal blogs. And I keep finding myself drawn to Nakamura over Carlsen. Is it some nationalism shining through? That I’m drawn to the American champ? The Olympics just wrapped up, so I hope I might be forgiven that sort of hometown hero mentality.

Yet I wonder what it means about me, about us, that I find Nakamura and Carlsen delta between them so stark. I know I’ll never be playing chess at a high enough level that it will make a difference which one I pay attention to, whose strategies and advice I take in. In my latest online game, I blundered my queen…and only won because my opponent blundered their own queen eight moves later and resigned in frustration, even though I thought their position was solid.

But as someone who has a lot of hobbies and interests, I’ve learned that you need to find joy in what you do. Find it—or create it.

You cannot will yourself to simply do something because you know it’s good for you. Not forever. Maybe some people can, but not me.

As an educator, I’m sick of the phrase “game-ify,” but I do game-ify my own life. I have a special writing playlist, I set word counts, and I’ll reward myself with treats when I finish a chapter. At the gym, I let myself put on truly cringey dance music when I’ve increased reps or weight. And playing chess, I try to think of Nakamura’s approach, his sense of fun. (Chess is, despite how much we associate it with mental agility and strong intellect, a game.) I think about the future, and what is possible—instead of what isn’t.

I’m not going to get to that GM level, but I can see the room for improvement. And watching Nakamura, I can see the fun in it. That gets me back to the internet-chessboard, instead of flipping it in despair. “All work and no play…” doesn’t apply here. The sense of play helps you put in the work.

Actually, this isn’t a blog about chess personalities, either.

This is a blog about politics. 

I’ll give Carlsen this much: he knows it’s not just about the game in front of him. It’s about every game that comes after. Please check your voter registration. Vote in your local elections. Every single one.