Do You Think Chess Is A Sport?

It never fails; in time with Magnus’ chessploits, the debate in Norwegian newspapers’ commentary fields rages red hot over whether chess is a sport or athletics, with no surprising conclusions: one agrees to disagree, definitions do not diminish or lessen Magnus’ performances and “you can’t compare apples and oranges.”

Before arguing chess is a sport and athletics, let’s first do away with the formalism:

According to Loland (as cited in Skjervum, 2009), Bryhn (2021) and Falk and Torp (1991, pp. 325-326) “athletics” (“idrett”, from old Norse, “id”, work or activity and “drott”, power, strength or perseverance (Bryhn, 2021; Falk & Torp, 1991, p. 326), in addition to bodily or physical accomplishments, which govern contemporary understanding, originally referred to all forms or expressions of highly regarded skills like music, poetry and knowledge of runes (Bryhn, 2018).

While athletics emphasizes the athletes’ efforts and control of the body (skiing, skating, boxing, tennis, handball and football), sports, meaning "anything humans find amusing or entertaining” (“Sport”, n.d.-a, n.d.-b), just as well appreciate the use of facilities, equipment, tools, devices, means of transport or animal as a basic condition (sailing, equestrianism and motor racing (“Sports”, n.d.-a)), and today the concepts are more often used interchangeably without a universal definition or agreement on what separates sport and idrett (athletics) from other leisure activities (“Sport”, n.d.-b), and at the same time raising the question if the distinction, or the concepts, are at all productive or expedient.

To begin with, we might say that all sports or athletic sports belonging under the Wikipedian definition amount to being “only” “play” or “a game” since these are ruled based activities. Claiming chess “is just a game”, because it is rule based, and therefore unworthy of undue attention, is a tautology (self-explanatory) and explains nothing. Mind you, the activity we call life may also be perceived to be a game with rules and recipes. When asking if chess is a sport or athletics, what we’re really asking is if chess players perform, and more so, in the physical sense of the word.

When former president of the Norwegian Athletic Federation (NIF) Rognlien (as cited in Vesteng, 2012)^[1],  and Fossum (2013), former vice president of the Norwegian Chess Federation (NSF) state that chess is not athletics because NSF is not a member of the NIF, this is self-contradictory. NSF not being a member of the NIF merely goes to show that NSF is not a member of the NIF, not that chess in and of itself is not athletics.

Despite agreeing in newspapers’ commentary fields that games and activities like chess, bridge, archery, dart, shooting etc., involve performance of some kind, still, the physical aspect seems to saturate contemporary understanding of what a sporting or athletic performance is. In a country obsessed with countables and quantifiables, what cannot be measured does not exist, we may ask if not the accent on the physical excludes the possibility for a finer perception of what “performance” or “achievement” might be. Few doubt mental gladiators perform but what, where and how? 

Is “blood, sweat and tears” (Kaggestad, (Norwegian athletics coach and TV commentator) as quoted in Holden & Hoff, 2012) or “motion” (1500-meter runner, Ingebrigtsen (as quoted in Holden & Hoff, 2012)) the only criteria on a sporting or athletic performance or achievement?

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The prevalent preference for the physical may be argued to be grounded in the still deeply rooted Cartesian (after René Descartes, 1596-1650, above in a Frans Hals painting) dualism matter (body)-mind (soul) representing two ontologically separate categories impossible to combine into a higher unity.

Not until Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012), suggested that we know, experience and are-in-the-world rather through our body, consciousness (cogito) was perceived as the primary source of knowledge and experience, the body a mere appendage.

While philosophy and religion emphasise the mind rather than the body, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that the brain (still) is part of the body [sic] and thus relaunches or reintroduces man as a homogenous unity consisting both of mind and matter, body and soul, mutually interdependent.

Just like religion and philosophy ignore the corporeal significance for knowledge and experience, Rognlien and Ingebrigtsen, in their emphasis of physical motion, go to the opposite extreme and accentuate the body at the expense of the brain, as if arms and legs move all by themselves.

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However, today we know that any corporeal motion starts off with electric impulses subconsciously triggered in the oubliettes of the brain. The brain’s computational power (speed and calculations per second) of one billion billion (10¹⁸) operations per second (Staughton, 2021) and the speed of thought clocked in to somewhere between 0.5-100 m/s (between 550 and 750 milliseconds for the information or perception of something to reach the brain and to be comprehended and interpreted (“Clocking the speed of thought”, 1998; Tovée, 1994, pp. 1125-1127), testify to motion. Because external corporeal motion, arms and legs, depends on internal cerebral motion, not yet clear is why external corporeal motion should weigh heavier concerning the definition of sports or athletics.

According to Nørretranders, studies of cerebral energy metabolism are studies of the work the brain does. Therefore, even internal mental activity, such as recalling the furnishing of a room, is a genuine physical and physiological activity with clear connections to perfectly tangible factors. Thought is an objective (material) event in the body in every way reminiscent of corporeal activities such as movement and there is no reason to consider thought any different from the rest of what the body does. Just like tennis, or any other physical activity, thought requires calories (Nørretranders, 1999, p. 119).

In other words, there is no principal difference between Magnus lifting his arm and sacking a kniggeth or Petter (Northug, Norwegian cross-country skier) lifting his poles and stroking himself forward; both actions spring from subconsciously triggered impulses in the brain. Strokes and chess moves have the same source. And voila! We have compared apples with oranges!

We may therefore conclude that the definitions of sports and athletics are not based on what is really going on but on what we observe and stem from a time before organised tournament chess and insights into the brain. We see arms and legs but not neurons and synapses.

The classical concept of athletics (idrett) suffers from inherent tension between physical performance on the one hand and technique, skills and proficiency on the other. However, in the modern understanding the physical aspect weighs heavier but are those with the most “blood, sweat and tears” the greatest athletes? Are cross-country skiers with shorter strokes and strides lesser athletes or perform lesser skiing than those with longer strokes and strides? High jump, with only a few seconds run before take-off, surely doesn’t qualify as athletics?

The point of technique/skills/proficiency is to reduce the physical effort, but are technically proficient athletes who makes less of a physical effort, but achieve better results greater athletes than less technically proficient athletes who makes more of a physical effort but with lesser results? High jumpers who make more of an effort but jumps lower? What about those who make the biggest effort and with the best results? What if you die on the playing field or during physical exertion? If not, we have to grade and define corporeal performance and where to draw the line?

As long as different activities yield different reactions, even if  lowest common multiples  may be found, “corporeal or physical performance” as a criterion on whether you do athletics or not, appears irrelevant because at times we do have “one of those days” and definitions do not depend on our day to day condition. Are those with the most “blood, sweat and tears” the greatest athletes? Do cross-country skiers with shorter strokes and strides, perform less athletics or skiing than those with longer strokes and strides? What if you die on the playing field or during physical exertion? If not, we have to grade and define corporeal performance and where to draw the line?

Do physical or bodily performances or skills lend themselves to precise defining or grading? Since measuring or quantifying chess skills and chess knowledge is impossible, the rating system is our best shot. What, then, makes for a decent rating? Magnus’ latest peak? And how to decide which activities and disciplines merit recognition as athletics (idrett)? In the days of yore, music, poetry and runes, but today?

To play chess, professionally or not, may be compared to study for and take an exam and chess players are graduating all the time, before, under and after tournaments. Professionals work on their chess between 7-8 hours a day and perform theoretically, practically, mentally and physically. They practice different types of positions; openings, middlegames and endgames and work on their tactics (reflexes and intuition) and scrutinise positions to improve their positional feeling and ability to calculate variations, i.e., visualising sequences of moves.

During the game they worry about their preparations (do I remember them and are they good enough?), the result of the game, their opponent for the next round and the outcome of the tournament. They have to be red alert (“Beware! The man on the other side, has bad intentions”, Bent Larsen) and keep their calm in attack as well as in defence. They worry if they can win good positions against stronger opposition and must take care not to underestimate lower rated opponents. They get headaches and sleep poorly while the mind grinds about today’s game.

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All this mental tension and exertion manifests itself physically, and well known is Karpov’s purported 10 kilos weight loss during his World Championship match against Kasparov in 84-85 (“Karpov vs Kasparov, 1984-85”) and that the young replaces the old.

The principle of the causal closure of the physical domain, which claims that every physical effect or event, like playing chess, using the physical body, has a physical cause (Kim, 1993, p. 280; Vicente, 2006, p. 150) teaches us that effects and causes must be of the same type—physical effects – physical causes. Just like our experience of headaches hinges on material prerequisites, chess players’ experience of physical fatigue depends on neural collaboration during strain and therefore makes it difficult with regard to the definition of sports or athletics to argue why more traditional physical exertion should weigh heavier than fatigue resulting from strong concentration over time (in studies as well as in tournament play).

Because the world basically is physical (where physicalism is concerned with how mental (non-physical) properties or states can exist in an otherwise physical universe and the metaphysical relation between mental and physical properties (Galaaen, 2001), knowledge (chess knowledge in our case), if to initiate actions or behaviour (fingers lifting and letting go of pieces), which are physical effects and therefore require physical causes (a non-physical consciousness cannot initiate actions, i.e. cause arms and legs to move) be physically represented in the brain with the debate revolving around how knowledge is represented.

Kaggestad mentions the competitive aspect as essential to whether something qualifies as a sport and, we may add, the competitive aspect transforms (any) activity into sport, if not necessarily into athletics.

At the same time, professionalisation of what formerly was perceived as leisure activities appears to challenge the leisure aspect of the concept of sport (if what we earlier did for leisure becomes our living, we must find something else to disperse ourselves) and emphasize the competitive aspect as more relevant as to if we are doing sports or not. However, skills or proficiency do not seem as embedded in the concept of sport (as in the concept of athletics) where we might compete without having the faintest idea of what we’re doing, or in the words of the late Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1912-2009): ‘We can very well dabble at something without making anything of it.’

According to Wikipedia, chess may therefore be a sport and athletics due to physical exertion (more so during tournaments than casual games), possible use of some device, tool or equipment and scoring points; 1 for a win, ½ for a draw and 0 for a loss. Thus, the definition also covers blindfold chess where players exchange only the coordinates when playing.

The expression “to become a sport”, precisely ties the competitive aspect to the concept of sports since we do not say “to become athletics”, suggesting you may exercise athletics without competing or scoring points. Since use of equipment, tools or devices is possible but not imperative, the competitive aspect appears more relevant as to if chess qualifies as a sport. By scoring points, one exerts oneself more, because more “is at stake” (Gadamer (1900-2002)).

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 (Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics or theory of interpretation, formulated in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, (2013, pp. 106-178), deals with how we, through our prejudices, expectations and presuppositions, “encounter” a work of art, say a painting or a text, and where this encounter jeopardises our understanding or interpretative framework, even if the painting is merely hanging on the wall. Think of a painting or a text that annoyed you or ticked you off. Congratulations, you’ve been played. A more convoluted point of bringing Gadamer into the discussion is that something may be at stake for both those in favor of chess being a sport and those claiming chess is “just a game.”)

The perceptive reader may have gleaned that the variety in activities in principle renders impossible standardization of requirements to physical performance and proficiency (embedded in the classical concept of idrett (athletics) and because any exertion (no matter how small) results in a physical effect, that any activity requires a minimum of knowledge or competence and because anything can “become a sport” (the competitive aspect), we risk an open or boundless concept of idrett or athletics, i.e., which comprises everything and nothing. However, if we limit ourselves to proficiency, reflected on rating lists, and the competitive aspect, chess (and high jump!) fulfils this requirement or perhaps NIF doesn’t suppose chess players compete in the right way?.

The debate over whether chess is a sport and/or athletics (idrett) or “just a game”, may be more significant than what first meets the eye and as so many other contexts, it’s all about the money. Doing sports or athletics is considered desirable with athletes serving as examples and role models. Sports and athletics are thought to develop a host of qualities, attributes and characteristics, e.g., team spirit, perseverance, ability to plan/analyse and carry out, not to mention the noble art of defeat, i.e., it’s not the winning that counts but the taking part etc. If chess, as we have seen, lends itself to be defined as sports and athletics, chess may attract commercial attention (read: sponsorships).

Conclusion:

The world being basically physical and standardization of physical performance required for something to be defined as sport/athletics seemingly impossible, apparently challenge our understanding and perception of our activities as sport or athletics where chess can be defined as a sport because players are amused and entertained by it (the definition of sport) and equipment not being necessary and athletics, not because we get in better physical shape by playing chess but because playing (tournament) chess involves physical performance and "know-how", i.e., skills and competence.

In a wider context and broader perspective, recent discoveries on brain and consciousness suggest that the conceptual distinction between sport and athletics ("idrett") is less clear and/or meaningful than perhaps hitherto assumed.

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Bibliography:

Bryhn, R. (2021, 19 January). Idrett [Athletics]. In Store norske leksikon. Retrieved 4 April 2021 from https://snl.no/idrett.

Clocking the speed of thought, (1998, 28 May). SCIENCEAGOGO. http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980428032910data_trunc_sys.shtml

Falk. H. & Torp, A. (1991). Etymologisk ordbog over det norske og det danske sprog. [Ethymological dictionary on the Norwegian and Danish language]. Bjørn Ringstrøms antikvariat.

Fossum, W. (2013, 6 April). –Sjakk er ikke idrett [Chess is not a sport]. Aftenposten. http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/i/5VxAm/--sjakk-er-ikke-idrett

Gadamer, H.G. (2013). Truth and method. Bloomsbury Academic.

Galaaen, Ø.S. (2001). Emergens og autonomi—Det mentales status i minimal fysikalisme [Emergentism and autonomy—The status of the mental in minimal physicalism] (Post-graduate thesis). University of Oslo.

Holden, L. & Hoff, J. B. (2013, 21 December). Kaggestad: -Sjakk er i høyeste grad idrett [Kaggestad: - Chess is a sport to the greatest extent]. VG. http://www.vg.no/sport/sjakk/kaggestad-sjakk-er-i-aller-hoyeste-grad-idrett/a/10048981/

Karpov vs Kasparov, 1984-85: The aborted match. (n.d.). Chessgames.com. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=55015

Kim, J. (1993). Supervenience and mind: Selected philosophical essays. Cambridge University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. [D. A. Landes, Trans.]. Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Nørretranders, T. (1999), The user illusion: Cutting consciousness down to size (J. Sydenham, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Skjervum, E (2009, 9 October), Er sjakk idrett? [Is Chess Sport?]. Dagbladet. http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/10/09/sport/sjakk/magnus_carlsen/lars_monsen/johan_kaggestad/8502980/ 

Sport. (n.d.-a). In Wikipedia. Retrieved 5 July, 2018, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport

Sport. (n.d.-b). In Wikipedia. Retrieved 5 July, 2018, from http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport. 

Staughton, J. (11 November 2021). The human brain vs. supercomputers… which one wins? Science ABC. Retrieved 12 November 2021 https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/the-human-brain-vs-supercomputers-which-one-wins.html

Tovée, M. J. (1994). Neuronal processing: How fast is the speed of thought? Current Biology, 4(12), 1125-1127. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(00)00253-0

Vesteng, C. (2012, 21 December). Idrettspresidenten: - Carlsen er ingen idrettsutøver [President of the Norwegian Athletic Association  (NIF): - Carlsen is no athlete]. VG. http://www.vg.no/sport/sjakk/idrettspresidenten-carlsen-er-ingen-idrettsutoever/a/10048955/

Vicente, A. (2006).  On the causal completeness of physics. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 20(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/02698590600814332

[1] Rognlien (as cited in Vesteng, 2012, para. 13) appear to be under the impression that “athlete” and “chess player” are mutually exclusive.

Courtesy and thanks to Mr.Frederic Friedel at Chessbase.com for great images to go with the article.

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Related posts:

Mind games—Who’s Doing the Playing?

FIDE—Who’s Being Indecisive?

Et argument for sjakk som sport og idrett (Norwegian)

* Update 9 July 2018 (Minor corrections of references)

** Update 17 January 2020 (Updated link about the brain's speed of operations per second)

*** Update 4 April 2021 (Bibliography updated to latest APA 7 (style of reference, updated Bryhn and Staughton link).

**** Update 12 November 2021 (Updated the reference to Staughton)

***** Update 2 March 2022 (Added a missing parenthesis to 'Clocking the speed of thought...)

About the author:

Born in 1968, Rune Vik-Hansen graduated from the University of Tromsø in 1999 with a post-graduate thesis on Heidegger's concept of Dasein. Other fields of interests are metaphysics, ontology, theory of science and political ethics.
Besides having worked as a teacher on different levels, Vik-Hansen also writes philosophical texts, chronicles, papers and essays as well as children’s literature.