By skyforbes 
By an audiovisual producer who’s learning the new game from the other side of the board.
For decades, chess was the perfect game to be forgotten
For most of its history, being a professional chess player was a kind of sentence:
brilliance, sacrifice, and invisibility.
You could be a total genius, see twenty moves ahead in an impossible position…
and still live off scraps, stuck in dim apartments, tutoring middle-class kids who would never understand the existential ache of being born in the wrong era.
And yet, something has changed.
Not because chess has suddenly become more lucrative.
But because the screen has become the new board.
And whoever knows how to move there can win without moving a single piece.
Bobby Fischer: the first camera-ready world champion
You don’t need to look far to understand the link between chess and narrative.
Bobby Fischer was perhaps the first grandmaster whose story mattered more than his actual games.
Not because he wasn’t brilliant (he absolutely was), but because his life was pure narrative conflict:
a prodigy, obsessive, system-defying, Cold War pawn turned American weapon — and finally, a broken legend.
When Edward Zwick directed Pawn Sacrifice (2014), he didn’t film moves.
He filmed themes:
paranoia, nationalist pressure, the violence of genius, and the implosion of a mind too sharp to fit within any structure.
Fischer wasn’t just a world champion — he was a symbol, a martyr, a brand.
That’s the lesson: chess becomes powerful when it’s told as a story.
Why does a draw have 60 million views?
Today, that kind of narrative power lives elsewhere.
You don’t need a feature film to turn a player into a legend.
You just need a reel. A gesture. A glance from Magnus Carlsen.
The Chess.com Instagram account features 15-second clips with more reach than most TV documentaries.
Carlsen offering a draw? 61 million views.
A tense Gukesh vs. Magnus exchange? Over half a million.
Why? Because those seconds don’t just show a move —
they carry centuries of history, lineage, and silent respect.
Even as TikTok accelerates culture into noise, chess stays still.
Behind every short lies the echo of Morphy, Capablanca, Alekhine, Lasker, Tal, Petrosian, Kasparov, Karpov…
people who gave their lives to a brutal and wordless language that now breathes through vertical videos.
The modern player is never alone at the board
Magnus Carlsen knows it. That’s why he doesn’t just play anymore — he’s now creating content as a member of Team Liquid.
Fabiano Caruana figured it out: he joined the same org, crossing into esports.
Hikaru Nakamura perfected it: streaming, charisma, punchy commentary.
Levy Rozman (GothamChess) monetized it: turning pedagogy into a viral business.
Meanwhile, dozens of talented young players still think memorizing openings is enough.
But that’s over.
If you don’t document, you don’t exist.
If you don’t communicate, you don’t connect.
If you don’t move people, you won’t survive.
Chess is content — but not just any kind
The future of chess isn’t just about ELO.
It’s about generating meaning, presence, and collective memory.
And that’s what well-crafted audiovisual work does:
it rescues what matters and makes it visible.
Now more than ever, chess is worth documenting.
Not as viral bait, but as legacy.
Not as empty entertainment, but as a thousand-year-old narrative system that still tells us something essential about the human mind.
Most viral content is trash. Chess isn’t.
Trash aesthetics, trash emotions, trash ethics.
Repetitive, hollow, optimized for nothing but dopamine.
And yet — chess is still here.
Stoic. Demanding. Alive.
Let producers and filmmakers tell its stories as they deserve to be told:
not as cheap spectacle, but as rich, nutritious, serious and beautiful narratives.
Stories that haven’t ended yet.
Brands + (Our Art x Audiovisual Power) = Stories That Challenge.
Alan De La Cruz, Audio/Visual Producer 🇲🇽