Is Chess the Least Expressive Sport? Former Badminton Athlete Naganethra Reddy's View and the Watchability Debate

In the global flow of sports information, the most talked-about statements often do not come from competing stars, but from observers standing outside the touchline. That is the case with Naganethra Reddy, a former badminton athlete who now works in sport sustainability, who published a personal commentary arguing that chess is “one of the least expressive sports”.

Notably, Naganethra Reddy is neither a professional chess player nor a chess analyst. Her route into chess was an ordinary one: she was inspired by her brother, and she found him very difficult to beat. Her statement therefore should not be read as a technical claim about chess strength, but as a view about the sport's expressiveness and its appeal to spectators.

Who is behind the statement?

Naganethra Reddy is a former badminton athlete, born in Bengaluru, India, and now based in London, United Kingdom. After her playing career, she moved into sport sustainability, a field attracting growing attention as sports organisations face pressure to cut emissions, optimise resources and build environmentally responsible images.

Her professional record is tied to several motorsport and endurance platforms, including Formula E, Extreme E and WEC, the World Endurance Championship. These are high-speed, fiercely competitive environments with very strong expressive power in front of audiences: engine noise, dust, collisions and emotional celebrations.

That background gives her statement credibility in two directions. On one hand, she understands what a visually compelling sport looks like and how energy is projected beyond the field of play. On the other hand, her engagement with chess is amateur — recreational and family-based, not elite competition. Her view therefore belongs in the category of public opinion, not expert chess analysis.

“Expressiveness” — the core concept of the debate

In spectator-experience research, expressiveness describes how directly and recognisably a sport communicates effort, emotion and momentum to viewers. A highly expressive sport is one where a casual viewer can glance at the screen and immediately understand who is ahead, who is struggling, and when a turning point is approaching.

Badminton is a textbook example of a highly expressive sport. Viewers see every jump, every smash, the speed of movement, the tension in body posture and the exhaustion on a player's face. Formula E and Extreme E are similar: speed, sound, overtakes and a sense of danger create a continuous emotional stream with almost no silence.

Chess is different by nature. All of its drama happens internally — inside the minds of two players. A casual viewer looking at the board cannot tell who is ahead, or whether the last move was a blunder or a deep trap. The tension, effort and emotion all exist, but they are nearly invisible on camera. This is precisely what Naganethra Reddy's remark touches: chess does not lack drama; its drama simply does not reveal itself.

Why is chess considered hard to watch?

Chess's problem in the eyes of casual viewers rests on three factors. First, abstraction: a 64-square board gives no direct visual signal about the balance of forces. Second, pace: a classical game can last many hours, most of it silent thinking. Third, language: understanding a single move requires knowledge of openings, tactics and endgames — a very high entry barrier.

Criticism of the “chess is not expressive” kind therefore does not target the sport's technique; it targets broadcast and audience retention. That distinction matters: misread, the argument becomes about whether chess is “good”; read correctly, it becomes about how to bring chess's internal drama to the outside.

Comparison with other sports

Chess is not the only sport criticised for low expressiveness. Archery, shooting, golf, snooker and bowling are also often placed in the hard-to-follow group, because their outcomes depend on small, precise movements that create little visual impact. Chess's difference, however, is its degree of abstraction: in golf or archery, viewers still see how far the ball travelled or how far the arrow missed the target, whereas in chess the “margin” exists only in engine evaluation and expert understanding.

Counterarguments from the chess community

The chess community usually offers two main counterarguments. First, chess drama is not absent — it simply shifts from physical expression to intellectual expression, and those who understand chess can feel extreme tension in a single unexpected move. Second, expressiveness is not the only measure of sporting value: strategy, cultural depth and accessibility across all ages are equally important indicators.

Broadcast innovation has narrowed the gap

In practice, the chess industry has made significant progress on exactly this problem. The most frequently cited tool is the engine evaluation bar, commonly called the Eval Bar, which displays the balance of a game visually in real time. Viewers no longer need to calculate for themselves to sense who is ahead and when a turning point occurs.

Alongside it has come the growth of professional commentary teams able to tell the story of a game, explain strategic intent and anticipate developments. Online tournaments, broadcasts featuring player-streamers, and behind-the-scenes and player-profile content have created a layer of “supplementary expressiveness” that the board itself cannot supply.

In other words, if the claim that “chess is unexpressive” was once valid when television merely showed two motionless players in close-up, it has become outdated relative to current content production. That is worth noting when weighing the statement's significance.

Chess is growing, not standing still

One striking paradox is that while expressiveness criticism persists, chess is enjoying strong growth in participation. Online chess platforms have recorded sharp user increases in recent years, particularly after periods of social distancing and thanks to spillover effects from films, television programmes and influential players on social media.

This growth shows the gap between “hard to watch” and “unattractive” is wide. A sport can be difficult to follow live in the short term while remaining compelling at the level of participation, learning and community. Chess proves the model: people may not sit through a three-hour classical game, yet still spend hours daily playing, solving tactics puzzles and debating on forums.

The format and draw-rate debate

At a deeper level, expressiveness criticism is often tied to a genuine industry topic: draw rates and competition formats. Top-level games produce a relatively high proportion of draws, and short, uneventful draws are often seen as unattractive to casual viewers. This has generated reform proposals such as anti-early-draw rules, altered time controls, or using rapid and blitz games to decide tournaments.

It must be stressed, however, that Naganethra Reddy's commentary references no specific format, tournament or regulation. Any link between her statement and format-reform debates is therefore inference, not content stated in the original article.

A view from the sport-sustainability sector

Interestingly, the author's own background is the article's most compelling hook. A specialist from sport sustainability, who has worked with electric motorsport platforms, offers an outside perspective on chess. That perspective has value as a data point on how sports professionals who are not chess specialists perceive the game.

At the same time, it reveals the statement's limits: understanding expressive sport does not automatically mean understanding chess. The weight of the claim therefore lies in “what spectators see”, not in “how chess operates”.

A Vietnamese chess audience perspective

For Vietnamese chess fans, this debate is not remote. Vietnamese chess has a long tradition, players who have competed internationally, and a steadily growing online playing community. The question of how to make chess easier to watch is therefore also a question for domestic tournament organisers, sports media and digital content creators.

One notable point is that Vietnamese audiences mostly approach chess through phones and computers, where supporting tools such as engine evaluation bars and live commentary have become standard. This makes the “chess is unexpressive” claim harder to accept locally, because for viewers used to digital platforms, chess drama is already translated for them.

Communications risk and what to monitor

In terms of impact, this commentary carries low risk. It is a personal opinion, tied to no tournament, player, organisation or commercial data. It creates no competitive, financial or governance risk for any stakeholder.

However, if the “chess is not expressive” framing is repeated by many non-chess sports figures within a short window, that could be a signal worth monitoring regarding chess's casual-audience conversion gap. Indicators to watch include: the frequency of similar criticism in mainstream sports media; traffic growth on online chess platforms; and viewership of major tournament broadcasts.

A second caution concerns misattribution. Naganethra Reddy's piece should not be treated as expert chess commentary. Any downstream interpretation must classify it as public-perception data, not technical or performance data.

Conclusion

Naganethra Reddy's statement — a former badminton athlete and sport-sustainability specialist — is not chess analysis but public-perception data. Its value lies in reminding the chess industry that the battle for casual audiences is ongoing, and that chess drama must be “translated” into visual language before it can reach a mass audience.

For chess, the most effective response is not to deny the criticism but to keep investing in spectator-experience design: real-time commentary, storytelling through the engine evaluation bar, building player profiles and personal narratives, and refining formats to reduce uneventful games. Done well, expressiveness stops being chess's inherent weakness and becomes a design problem with a solution.

In a broader sense, the story also reflects a familiar rule of modern sport: the value of a discipline lies not only in how it is played, but in how it is retold, interpreted and delivered to the public.