International Chess Day: The Game That Was Supposed to Die

A Holiday for a Board Game

International Chess Day falls on July 20. The date marks the founding of FIDE, the Federation Internationale des Echecs, in Paris on July 20, 1924. Chess players have celebrated it among themselves since 1966. Then on December 12, 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution making it official, proclaimed as World Chess Day, tabled by Armenia and co-sponsored by more than fifty other countries.

A board game has a UN resolution. No other game has that. Armenia, which pushed for it, made chess a mandatory subject in its public schools.

Something like 605 million adults play chess regularly. In the major chess-playing countries, roughly seventy percent of adults have played at some point in their lives. It’s one of the largest shared activities on the planet, and it survived the thing that was supposed to kill it.

The Year the Machine Won

On May 11, 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in the sixth and final game of their rematch.

Kasparov was the reigning world champion and, by most accounts, the strongest player who had ever lived. He stood up and walked away from the board after about an hour. Newsweek had billed the match “The Brain’s Last Stand.” IBM’s market value went up by billions overnight.

I was working in enterprise IT at the time. I spent thirty-three years in that world, twenty of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, and I remember exactly how that week felt inside a data center. Deep Blue was a machine with thirty-two processors evaluating two hundred million positions per second, meaning it was very fast and very stupid, and fast enough that stupid stopped mattering. Those of us who worked with the hardware understood that. Almost nobody outside did.

The reaction outside wasn’t measured. The Wall Street Journal asked whether it was one small step for a computer and one giant leap backward for mankind. Chess had been the standing proof that human thinking was special. Whatever a machine could do, it couldn’t do this. Then a machine did this, and the obituaries started.

Those headlines still irritate me. They came from people who’d never looked inside the box, and they sold the end of human thinking because an ending always sells better than a faster calculator. The same kind of commentator is writing the same obituary for writers now, with the same confidence and the same lack of evidence.

What happened to chess after 1997?

Chess got bigger.

Not immediately, and not smoothly, but the direction was never really in doubt once the dust settled. Engines got stronger every year.

Stockfish arrived and would demolish Deep Blue without noticing. AlphaZero taught itself the game from nothing in 2017 and played moves that grandmasters described as alien. At no point did any of this reduce the number of people who wanted to sit across a board from another person.

It did the opposite. The engines became teachers. A club player in 2026 has access to analysis that the world champion in 1985 couldn’t have bought at any price. Every game you lose, you can hand to an engine and find out exactly where you went wrong, the fastest way anyone has ever learned anything. The machines didn’t replace the players. They trained them.

And the human part turned out to be the part people wanted to watch. Nobody streams two engines playing each other. Millions of people watch humans play, badly and brilliantly and under pressure, because the interest was always in a person finding a move.

That’s the part of the story that makes me happiest. People wanted to watch somebody sweat over a position, blunder, and claw their way back, and no amount of engine strength was ever going to scratch that itch for them.

Why This Is a Writing Holiday

You can see where this goes.

Every argument being made about AI and writing right now was made about computers and chess between 1997 and roughly 2005. The craft is finished. Why would anyone pay a human. There’s no point learning this. It’s all going to be automated.

Chess ran that experiment for thirty years and published the results. The machine got better than every human, permanently and by an enormous margin, and the human activity grew. It grew because the value of a human doing a difficult thing was never located in being the most efficient possible processor of that thing.

I write books for other people. Nobody has ever hired me because I was the fastest available way to convert their thoughts into sentences. They hired me because there’s a difference between a document and a book. The difference lives in judgment: what the writer leaves out, and which of the six stories a person tells is the one the reader needs.

An engine will tell you the best move. It won’t tell you which game is worth playing.

What chess can teach you about structure

Chess divides a game into three phases, and the division maps almost exactly onto writing a book.

The opening is memorized and shared. Everyone knows the good ones. There are books full of them, and studying them is table stakes instead of an advantage. In writing, this is your hook, your first chapter, the part every workshop drills you on. (More on The First 50 Pages) Most writers are strong here because it’s the part that gets the most attention.

The middlegame is where books are won and lost.

The opening theory has run out, the position is complicated, no reference tells you what to do, and you have to think. This is chapter four through chapter fifteen. This is where almost every abandoned manuscript gets abandoned. Writers who can survive a middlegame finish books. Writers who cannot, don’t, and they usually blame discipline when the problem is that nobody taught them this phase exists.

This is the phase that makes me angriest on behalf of writers. Every workshop and every contest obsesses over the first ten pages, and then a writer hits chapter six, feels the ground go soft, and decides they must be lazy, when nobody ever told them the middle is a different game with its own skills. I think that silence has killed more books than any shortage of talent.

The endgame is technique. Fewer pieces, more precision, and a body of known results that separates people who have studied from people who haven’t. In a book this is your final act, your conclusion, the place where a manuscript either lands or fizzles out. It’s learnable and most people never bother.

If you want one practical thing from this holiday, it’s that. Stop polishing your opening. Your opening is fine. Go learn to survive the middle.

The Game That Writes Itself Down

Chess is the only major game whose entire history is written down, move by move, going back centuries. Algebraic notation means you can reconstruct every serious game ever played exactly. You can replay a game from 1858 and see the position as the players saw it. You get the game itself, no summary or highlights.

No other pursuit has that. We have box scores for baseball and we have footage of some of it, but we don’t have the game. Chess players worked out a long time ago that if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. Then they built a notation disciplined enough to make the record complete.

That’s the argument for writing your book, made by a board game. Your career is a long game with real decisions in it, and right now you aren’t recording any of it.

The people who came after Paul Morphy can study his exact thinking because somebody wrote the moves down. Whoever comes after you gets a LinkedIn profile and some anecdotes. That is a thin inheritance.

Kasparov’s Real Mistake

There’s a footnote to 1997 worth carrying around.

Kasparov didn’t lose that match because Deep Blue outplayed him in some deep sense.

He lost because he abandoned the aggressive, chaotic style that had made him the best player alive and tried to play carefully instead, on the theory that a machine could be ground down but not out-fought. He played not to lose. It’s widely regarded as the reason he lost.

Writers do exactly this. They read about AI, get scared, and start producing the safest, most defensible, most obviously competent work they can manage. Which is exactly the work a machine produces best. The way to lose to a machine is to play like one.

This is the mistake I see most often right now, and it’s painful to watch. Writers with real voices are sanding themselves down into something inoffensive because they’re scared, and the result reads like it came out of a machine anyway. I’d much sooner see a writer lose playing their own game.

Kasparov, to his credit, worked this out. He spent the years after the match arguing that a weak human with a good machine and a good interface beats a strong machine alone. He wasn’t describing a consolation prize. He was describing the actual shape of the future, and he was more or less right.

How to Mark the Day

Play a game. Against a person if you can find one, online if you cannot. Lose it, and then look at where you went wrong, the only part that teaches you anything.

Then write down something you did this year that nobody has a record of. Not for publication. Just to prove to yourself that the position exists and can be reconstructed.

Chess players have been doing that since 1924, and they ended up with a game that’s healthier than it’s ever been. I want writers to get the same outcome, and they won’t if they spend the next ten years mourning a craft that hasn’t died.

International Chess Day FAQ