Chess makes move as next spectator sport

If Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan ever decides to completely hang up chess, he should be comforted to know he has a future in golf. Maybe not as a player – I haven’t even seen his backswing – but certainly as a commentator.

I realized this on a Sunday afternoon a couple weeks ago, sprawled out in the same sunken spot on my couch where I had lain for hours, still unshowered and in my underpants. I don’t even play golf, but that’s definitely how I watch it.

I took in the U.S. Championships of chess as I do the Masters. The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis recently converted its basement into a production studio and broadcast the national tournament out to tens of thousands of the game’s fanatics around the world. While America’s best battled upstairs in the tournament hall, high-tech boards with micro-chipped pieces sent positions to viewers instantly, as they happened.

And I relished Yasser on a lazy Sunday the same way I do Jim Nantz. Seirawan, a four-time U.S. champion himself, took in each move and offered opinion on what those upstairs grandmasters might be thinking, showing us his thoughts as he clicked around his own digital analysis board. Alongside Women’s Grandmaster Jennifer Shahade and Grandmaster Maurice Ashley, the three highlighted key squares and hot pieces, tossed in the occasional arrow of attack, and broke each game down to a level that any woodpusher could understand.

https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/31133/chess_on_fox_052813?coverpage=3348