The Chessboard and Its Empty Squares: Writing About Chess in a World Full of Data

In my data notebook, there is a page left blank. It is not a page I forgot to write. It is the page about a round of play during which I sat in front of the screen for four hours, three tabs open side by side — a live standings tab, a games database tab, a personal notes tab — and all three returned zero. No move, no player's name, no match date. Only the ceiling fan and a frame waiting for data that would never arrive. I remember sitting there, hands on the keyboard, waiting for something to write about, and realizing the only thing present was absence. When the stadium is empty, I hear the ball speak for thousands of people. This time, the chessboard was silent in the same way — and I understood that my craft does not begin with data; it begins with how I choose to face the gap. That silence was not unfamiliar. It took me back to a July evening in 2026, when I was a student intern in Da Nang, assigned to commentate online on the U21 Vietnam versus U21 Timor-Leste match at Hoa Xuan Stadium. In the 23rd minute, I misread the opposing team's number 9 striker's name, turning "Garcia" into "Pedro" three times in a row. Fans in a central Vietnam group mocked me for talking like someone reading a newspaper. I was ashamed enough to want to turn off the microphone and disappear. But I did not quit. I spent a full month rewatching footage from the entire tournament, transcribing every player's name correctly, and by the end of it I had memorized nearly two hundred players. From that fall, I learned the first and most sacred lesson of the trade: facts must stand firm before emotion is allowed to speak. A mistake before the microphone taught me that perfection is only the draft of sincerity. When I moved into the chess world afterwards, I carried that lesson like a required notebook. Because chess, more than any other sport, is a world built out of data. Every player has an Elo rating updated monthly by the International Chess Federation (FIDE). Every game can be analyzed down to the percentage of similarity with moves chosen by an engine. People measure quality through ACPL — the average loss per move in centipawns — and compare it across players the way one compares the heart rates of track athletes. A top-level game today can generate thousands of data points: thinking time for each move, accuracy in attack, mental stamina expenditure in the endgame, win probability updated by the second. The surface of this sport is flat and gleaming like a perfect spreadsheet. But precisely because the surface gleams too brightly, writers easily forget that beneath it are flesh-and-blood people, with breath, with fear, with hands that tremble when they touch a piece. In 2026, in Singapore, the young Indian player Gukesh Dommaraju, then just 18, defeated reigning world champion Ding Liren 7.5-6.5 to become the youngest world champion in chess history. The whole world talked about the number 18. News outlets raced to publish age charts and rating graphs. But in my emotion notebook, I recorded a different detail: the moment in game fourteen when Ding Liren — a man who had gone through a turbulent period with health and form — sat motionless before the board for a few seconds after realizing his mistaken move. No data can measure those seconds. No ACPL figure can hold them. And no ranking list can print the feeling of a human being who has just lost the crown he spent a lifetime winning. That is why I keep two notebooks in parallel. The first is the data notebook: Elo ratings, head-to-head records, win rates with the white pieces, opening histories, dates, tournaments, the full names of every opponent. The second is the emotion notebook: a rub of the eyes, a hand tightening on the king before a move, a sigh when checkmated, a hush in the stands when a game extends into a blitz tiebreak. I never let these two lines merge carelessly, because data must hold up emotion, not let emotion drag data off course. When data does not come — as on that four-hour afternoon — I am not allowed to invent it. I am only allowed to write about its failure to arrive. That may sound eccentric to a newsroom chasing deadlines. But I believe this is the most important boundary of chess commentary, and also the boundary young writers most easily step over. Because chess has a strange obsession: an obsession with completeness. A match without data is considered incomplete. A piece without figures is considered weak. So people stuff in: an estimated rating, a comparison without a source, a prediction line that sounds very certain. And right at that moment, commentary loses the very thing that gives it value. Truth is an asset that cannot be borrowed, and every time we fabricate data to make deadline, we are borrowing at heavy interest against our own credibility for years to come. I think of the famous 2026 case, when world number one Magnus Carlsen withdrew from a tournament in the United States after losing to Hans Niemann, and later stated he did not wish to continue playing this opponent, triggering a cheating controversy that lasted for months. Public opinion split into two camps very quickly. The first said Carlsen was right, that elite chess was under threat from technology. The second said Carlsen was opening a witch hunt without public evidence. But few noticed that throughout that scandal, the most severely missing thing was not an Elo rating or a win count — it was evidence, process, a transparent mechanism to state clearly what had happened and what had not. People argued with emotion about a matter that needed to be handled with data. And when data is insufficient, that gap gets filled with rumor. That is the expensive price of an industry that refuses to say: we do not yet know. Saying "I do not yet know" is a harder skill than we think. In chess, there is an entire culture worshiping certainty to the point that writers fear admitting they do not understand. But look at the board itself. The board has 64 squares, and there are always empty ones. No game begins with every square occupied. Emptiness is the starting state, not a defect. So why, in the writing trade, do we treat gaps as shameful? A gap has its own voice. I learned this during the pandemic, when tournaments took place in empty stadiums and an entire sports world had to learn to talk to itself. Chess is naturally quieter than football, so the gaps in chess are subtler, harder to grasp. A silent game does not mean nothing is happening. Sometimes it means too much is happening inside the head of the person sitting at the board, to the point that every outside sound must fall still. The microphone does not make the storyteller. It is the silence of the stands that signs every line of dialogue. I remember one time sitting at an international chess tournament held in Vietnam — where the online standings suddenly failed to update results, and for about ten minutes, viewers did not know who was winning. During those ten minutes, social media overflowed with speculation. Some insisted the local player had the advantage. Others said the foreign opponent had turned it around. No one had data, yet everyone had conclusions. When the standings updated again, the position turned out to be more complex than every rumor, and the only correct thing anyone should have said during those ten minutes was: we do not yet know. I wrote in my notebook: crowds fear gaps, so they fill them with random belief. For a writer, the task is the reverse: to keep the gap in the right place, so it says what complete data can never say. A player withdraws from a tournament for personal reasons — the statement carries only one line. We do not know what is inside him. But we can write about why a man at the peak sometimes chooses silence, about the cost of that silence to those left behind, about the games not played and the moves not spoken. In chess there is a concept called "zugzwang": a position where any move makes things worse, and one only wishes the turn would pass to the opponent. There are moments in a human life that are also zugzwang — every choice hurts, so we go silent. Writing about that requires no fabricated data. Only sincerity. This does not mean I advocate vagueness. On the contrary, precisely because I respect the gap, I must be even stricter with data. Because a gap is only worth discussing when real data surrounds it. If the whole piece is a sea of vagueness, the gap drowns in the fog. But if I have verified seventeen facts, and the eighteenth cannot be proven, then that eighteenth becomes the place for the reader to breathe. They trust me because of the first seventeen, and they remember me because of the eighteenth I dared leave blank. This is what I call "picking up the small detail as the pivot of the whole". Readers are often surprised that I do not write about the decisive goal or the peak rating, but about a pawn quietly sacrificed on the twenty-third move, a scoresheet keeper sitting silently behind a player, a scarf placed askew on the back of a chair. But those details are where data and humanity meet. They are real, they are verifiable, and they carry an entire game, an entire career, an entire life in the palm of the hand. I remember another story, not from chess but one I still carry. The 2026 World Cup in Russia, the quarterfinal between Croatia and the host nation, ending 2-2 after 120 minutes with Croatia winning 6-5 on penalties. My most famous piece from that period did not mention the result at all. It spoke only of the moment Luka Modric wiped his face with the sleeve of his number 10 shirt, where sweat and tears became one. Modric's tear does not belong to Croatia; it belongs to those who have lost enough to understand. Why do I retell a football story in a chess piece? Because the principle is identical. In chess, that moment is not the checkmate. It is the blink just before extending a hand to the opponent after a loss that lasted three games. I have learned to turn "emptiness into sound". In my writing, I often insert details that seem superfluous: the even tap of a chess clock in a silent tournament hall, the scrape of a chair on a wooden floor as a player stands to walk between games, the sound of a mother in the audience holding her breath as her child enters the endgame. Those sounds appear on no chart. But they are the only thing left long after the game ends. Sports culture is a graveyard of names, so that their stories live one more game. And the writer's task is to guard that graveyard, not to let those names be buried too deep under numbers. The irony is that the modern chess world itself is pulling us the other way. The era of analytical engines lets every game be graded to the percent. Online platforms generate hundreds of millions of games a day, each one a dataset. Streamed tournaments have ratings boards running continuously, evaluation bars jumping with every move, win probability updated by the second. Faced with such a world, a writer has two paths. The first is to become a machine reprinting numbers. The second is to stand among the numbers and point out what is worth saying. I choose the second, but it is never easy. Many times I have been swept up by the temptation to interpret everything. When a young player wins three events in a row, I want to write about a "golden generation". When a veteran's form declines, I want to write about "the decay of an era". But each time, my data notebook pulls me back. Are three tournaments enough to speak of a generation? What is the sample size? How strong were their opponents? Did they win through strength or a favorable schedule? And beneath the celebrating public opinion, is there a player who is exhausted, sleepless, afraid of losing? The answer to most of those questions, at the moment of writing, is: I do not yet know. I believe this is where the truly counterintuitive angle lies. Public opinion always wants a tidy answer: that the new generation has taken over, that the old era has ended, that technology has made everything transparent. But sport does not run on charts. Every cycle, people declare "this is the moment of transition", and every time, history quietly refutes half of it. Champions whom people thought finished win again. Golden generations that people celebrated fall apart over an injury or an unforeseen event. The only stable thing is uncertainty, and the wise writer is the one who tells that unfinished story honestly. Perhaps the most frightening thing in this trade is not writing poorly. It is writing wrongly while sounding very good. A perfect sentence can carry a fabricated fact, and readers will remember the sentence, not the distorted truth. That is why the worst habit I must guard against is writing the conclusion first and finding data later. When a piece is already "ripe" in my head, I easily create facts to serve emotion, and that destroys credibility faster than any other error. I keep one hard rule for myself: if two independent sources show I have misunderstood, I am not allowed to defend my ego by clinging to an old argument. Patience in defending a differing view is an identity, but taken too far it becomes stubbornness, and stubbornness harms the truth. That is also why I must be wary of my own two notebooks. They are good when kept separate, but under deadline pressure, a writer easily blends them unconsciously. A number from the data notebook can be colored by a memory from the emotion notebook, and then data begins to smell of expectation. My self-check is simple: before publishing, I read the piece aloud to someone who knows nothing about chess. If that person interrupts and asks "where does this figure come from", I know I am writing for myself rather than for the reader. Once, I stayed behind after a broadcast and asked myself: without data, without ratings, without an analytical engine, what is left of chess to talk about? The answer came not from a great game, but from the street chess games I once watched in Saigon, where men sat in the shade of trees, playing with old plastic pieces, making moves no chart ever recorded. No Elo rating there. No displayed win probability. But there was a man tilting his head in thought, the sigh of a spectator, the quiet joy when an unexpected move won. And I realized: when all the numbers vanish, what remains is exactly what I need to write. That is why I built a "library of remembered sound" for myself. I record the taps of the clock, the applause, the sighs, the singing. In every piece, I try to rebuild the scene through a sense of hearing, turning emptiness into a new layer of emotion. Some say chess is a sport of silence, and they assume silence has nothing to write about. I think the opposite. Silence is a language. And a good chess writer is one who learns the grammar of that silence. Looking at the bigger picture, I see Vietnamese chess at a particularly interesting moment. Our international players, after years of persistence, still hold positions near the top of the region and leave their mark in several international events. Behind them is a younger generation growing up in an era of engine-based training and online competition, growing faster, younger, but also more psychologically vulnerable. For them, data is a companion from very early on — but it can also be an invisible cage, because any move is graded immediately. A writer covering them must therefore see the human behind the metrics, and must be patient enough not to rush to judgment about a career that has only just begun. I remember telling a young colleague: do not fear a piece with a gap. Fear a piece with an error. Because a reader will fill a gap themselves, but they will believe an error, and betrayed trust leaves a long scar. Our trade does not promise victory. Sport does not promise victory; it only promises a heartbeat that dares to continue. And the writer loyal to that heartbeat will never run out of things to say, even when the only thing present is an empty square. Many ask me why I chose a quieter sport to make a career of, when football could bring more glory. I do not answer with choice. I answer with memory. Chess taught me that patience is a form of attack. It taught me that sometimes the right move is not the strongest move, but the one that holds the position. And it taught me that a writer can be opposed by the whole world for a piece no one reads at once, and still be remembered years later for saying the right thing at the wrong time. At my desk, I am known as a slow but steady writer. I do not mind slowness, because what is fast usually only travels a short distance. There is a question I still ask myself every time I open my laptop: will this piece help the reader understand one more small corner of what it means to be human, or merely know one more number? If it is only a number, I should leave it in the data notebook and not print it. But if there is a person in it — someone who lost, someone who rebuilt, someone silent — then I must write, even if the gap remains intact. Back to that four-hour afternoon. I wrote no article from that empty data table. Instead, I wrote a very short piece, just a few hundred words, saying that today the data did not arrive, that I could not say who won or lost, that there was a gap I chose not to fill with guesswork. That piece had no rating, no percentage, no probability. But it had readers. Someone messaged me that they finished reading and felt relieved, because for the first time a sports writer dared to say "I do not yet know". I keep that message in the emotion notebook, right next to the blank page. Because ultimately, what chess readers seek is not someone who is always right. They seek someone willing to stand before the board of life and admit that some squares no one can fill — not the strongest tool, not the fullest data. And in those very squares, humanity truly appears. When the stadium is empty, I hear the ball speak for thousands of people. When the chessboard falls silent, I hear what the numbers refuse to say. Writing about chess, in the end, is not the trade of counting moves. It is the trade of sitting for a very long time beside someone who is thinking, waiting with them, and believing that the moment they look up will be worth recording. I do not know where the next game will go. But I know I will be there, with two notebooks, one for facts, one for tremors, and a gap always left at the end of the piece — a place for the reader to step in with their own story. Sport does not promise victory; it only promises a heartbeat that dares to continue. And the writer faithful to that heartbeat will never run out of things to say, even when the only thing present is an empty square.