[Rainn Wilson] In an average year, more than 7,000 new movies are released
and over a thousand new TV shows,
thousands of new video games,
hundreds of thousands of new podcasts,
and more than 60,000 new tracks
are uploaded to Spotify every day.
Among all these options for pleasure and diversion,
the one that experienced the greatest surge in popularity in 2020
is over 1,500 years old.
A boom is taking place in chess like we have never seen.
[reporter] The game is topping wish lists this holiday season,
and retailers say they're having trouble keeping it in stock.
Even internationally,
it looks like downloads for chess are up by 11%.
[narrator] For a brief period, it was the most popular genre
on the streaming platform Twitch,
surpassing video games like League of Legends and Fortnite.
Thousands even tuned in to watch me play.
He blunders to H4. Logic's gonna see the checkmate, I think.
[Wilson] What was that? Idiot!
When I look at chess through its history,
it was considered a game that people who were very smart played.
Great leaders have been drawn to it.
And thinkers,
and artists,
and elite athletes.
[man] Celebrities who come to play chess in the store.
Marcel Duchamp used to come and play in this address.
Stanley Kubrick used to come and play.
But also Bobby Fischer used to come and play.
To be a good chess player, you do not have to be a genius.
I think that's a very big myth.
[Wilson] But chess has always been more than just a pastime.
One that transcends age, creed and culture,
but somehow never gets old.
It's fascinating. It's like escaping from your real life
into this new world of 64 squares.
[Wilson] So why does this ancient board game
continue to capture our imagination?
What's so special about chess?
[man 1] Chess is a great game. A game and a sport for the mind.
[man 2] One needs to give all one's time to it to make
the top players in the world.
I like to play chess because it's a nice game.
We now realize that anyone with a normal one of these pieces of equipment
can become a Grandmaster.
[man 3] The chess-playing machine learns the best moves
by using its past experience to analyze a number of different moves.
And then selects one.
[crowd clamoring]
[Wilson] A kingdom is under attack.
The enemy's cavalry has stormed the castle.
The king already fled.
Nobody's sure where he's going,
but they'll fight until they learn he's dead.
For the first time in her life, the queen is entirely helpless.
An empire brought to its knees so spectacularly,
it's the kind of thing future generations should study.
And they have.
That's all happening on this chess board.
And this moment in this game
is the stuff of legend.
[man] It was a beautiful game.
And to beginners, of course, it just looked miraculous.
[Wilson] Edward Lasker, a German engineer,
had no idea he was about to make chess history
when he got off the boat in London on that fateful day in 1912.
And his first stop was the city's top chess club.
Lasker didn't speak a word of English, but here,
it didn't matter. A man invited him to play a quick game.
Lasker didn't know it was Sir George Alan Thomas,
arguably the best player in England.
It was a casual, offhand game that happened to be recorded.
It was not in a tournament, and it was not for money.
[Wilson] Today, it's nicknamed "The Perfect King Hunt"
because it's so exquisitely brutal.
Or sometimes "Fatal Attraction,"
because it's beautiful at the same time.
And to really see the beauty of it,
it first helps to know how to play.
Am I teaching a six-year-old or a 20-year-old?
[woman] A six-year-old. Definitely a six-year-old.
[Wilson] At your disposal are eight pawns,
your foot soldiers.
[Saidy] The six-year-olds identify with the pawns.
They're the weakest little pieces,
but they can overcome the enemy king.
Then you have the rooks, the powerful castles.
It just goes in a straight line. It's not the most exciting piece.
[Wilson] Next to the rooks are your knights.
They look like…
Horsies. Everybody loves horsies, okay?
[Nakamura] They move in an "L" shape.
-[Saidy] They hop around. -Kind of like a horse.
[Khachan] Next player is the bishop.
[Nakamura] Very far distance. They can go from one end of the board to the other end
and attack your opponent's pieces.
[Wilson] Next to the bishop is your most powerful piece.
Prior to the late 15th century,
that piece only went one square.
[Wilson] But then a lot of powerful female leaders emerged all over Europe.
And suddenly that weak piece…
[Saidy] Was replaced by a queen
that could go all over the board in one move.
Without a queen, unless you are good, you might as well resign.
[Wilson] And then there's your most important piece of all.
[Saidy] The little king,
that can only go one square in any direction.
He seems like such a weakling,
but if you don't protect him, you lose the game.
[Wilson] In ancient Persia, they'd say,
"Shah mat,"
"The king is dead,"
which became "checkmate."
And that's it.
This is your army, same as your enemy's.
Now, you just have to make your first move.
Edward Lasker drew white pieces, which meant he would go first.
And there were 20 things he could do.
Same for Sir Thomas.
But already those two choices
could result in 400 different games.
Lasker and Thomas played this one.
A move later, the number of possible board configurations shoots up
to 71,852.
After each player makes their third move, it's around nine million.
With that many options, how do you decide what to do?
For centuries, the answer was "You're out for blood."
[Saidy] In the 18th century, that was considered
the only gentlemanly way to play the game.
And you attack the opponent with complete abandon,
you give away pawns at will.
We call that the Romantic era of chess.
[Wilson] It roughly coincided with the Romantic era in the arts.
Music, painting, poetry
focused on emotional expression rather than technical mastery.
Chess wasn't just about winning.
It was about winning beautifully.
[Saidy] Then Steinitz came along.
[Wilson] Wilhelm Steinitz,
the first official world chess champion, and he said…
[Saidy] "Well, this is a little crude."
[Wilson] Steinitz ushered in a new era,
the scientific school of chess.
Just as artists moved away from drama in favor of realism and precision,
chess players set about laying down fundamental principles of the game.
Look at these moves again.
Lasker goes for the center of the board.
Trying to control the center is principle number one.
It's the heart of the battlefield.
Then Lasker moves his knight.
That's a second principle.
Get your more powerful pieces into the action as soon as possible.
But in the opening, you're not on your own.
The great players of the past have already done a lot of the heavy lifting.
[Nakamura] There's the Danish Gambit, the Evans Gambit.
[Saidy] Sicilian Defense,
the French Defense, the Ruy Lopez.
[Wilson] And yes, the Queen's Gambit.
Hundreds of openings have been codified,
and it helps to know some opening theory.
[Saidy] If your opponent knows it and you don't,
you may fall into a trap. You don't want to be in that boat.
[Wilson] But by move four, the number of distinct board configurations
is already at 315 billion.
Sooner or later, you have to abandon the book moves
and start fending for yourself.
[Saidy] The middlegame is the main fighting arena,
where plans and strategies are carried out.
The middlegame usually decides
the outcome of the game.
[Wilson] Lasker's bishop is out for blood.
But the triumph is short-lived.
A pawn bravely enters the bloodbath
and is instantly slaughtered.
The white queen almost had the king in her sights,
before he ducked for cover.
This was an exhilarating game for the time it was played.
Remember, this was 1912.
The scientific school was at its peak,
and chess had been transformed into something more sophisticated,
calculated, and…
boring.
But a whole new era was just about to begin.
The age of rebellion in arts, music,
politics, and chess.
Meet the hypermodernists.
[Saidy] They were iconoclasts,
and they said, "We're going to play differently."
[Wilson] Like leaving the center of the board open,
but positioning their pieces in such a way that the center
became a death trap.
"We're not giving up the center, we're just controlling it differently."
[Wilson] The hypermodernists did to chess what surrealists did to art.
Taking things that seemed ordinary and reimagining their possibilities.
Nothing had to be what it seemed.
We have to keep in mind that chess is the oldest war game in history.
At the highest competitive level,
it's really a blood sport.
It's hard.
[Wilson] During a tournament, a chess player's blood pressure
can stay as high as a competitive marathon runner's.
And they can burn up to 6,000 calories a day,
more than a world-class tennis player.
All while sitting down,
simply thinking.
So in the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist,
Adriaan de Groot,
set out to study what goes on in a chess player's mind.
He presented players of various skill levels
with an unfamiliar position like this,
and then asked them to think aloud as they decided their next move.
And he found that Grandmasters and regular pros
considered around the same number of options for their next move.
And they plotted out an almost identical number of moves ahead.
So, what made the great players great?
Well, they saw better options.
[Saidy] Richard Réti, one of the great hypermoderns,
was asked how many moves did he look ahead.
And he said,
"Only one. The best one."
I think, first and foremost, you have to be very strong at memorizing.
Almost everybody who's a very strong Grandmaster
will have some way of recalling games they've played over their long career,
so oftentimes will look at the placement of where the bishops and knights are,
where the pawns are,
and try to compare it to games we've played in the past.
[Wilson] To a chess player,
the positions of pieces are like piano chords to a composer.
After each chord,
the player might consciously consider just a few options,
because they've stored deep down
how dozens would sound.
And that comes from studying scales and keys,
wisdom codified centuries ago
about what patterns of notes sound good.
And it also comes
from playing.
It's a matter of experience.
And believe me, there's a lot of playing and studying
that goes into making a master player.
[Wilson] And in the 20th century,
nobody studied harder than the Soviets.
Chess was studied in schools
and played in the parks, and along riverbanks.
Clubs emerged all over the country,
and magazines reprinted famous games and analyses.
Chess is one of the things that nations compete in,
because it's, in a way, a reflection of the progress of the nation.
[Wilson] For the regime, chess dominance wasn't just about the fight on the board.
It was the proof of communist intellectual superiority
over the decadent West.
For 24 years, they didn't just win the World Championship.
Nobody else qualified to even play against them.
Until 1972
and Bobby Fischer.
In the US,
chess was suddenly prime-time material.
Russia's Boris Spassky, the world champion,
is to meet America's Bobby Fischer
in a 24-game championship match this summer.
At stake, immense prestige for the Russians,
who jealously guard their reputation as the country of the chess masters.
The International Chess Federation wants word by tomorrow morning from Fischer
on whether he's agreeable to 24 games in Iceland,
and Fischer is taking his time answering.
He had had a reputation
for being extremely finicky and demanding
throughout his career.
[Wilson] Bobby Fischer finally did agree to go
and traveled to New York to catch the flight, but then
changed his mind.
Nobody knew what to do. He wouldn't get on the plane.
[Wilson] Leaving Boris Spassky
and the rest of the world,
in suspense.
Is it upsetting your routine, this waiting?
No, thank you. Thank you very much for your questions.
[reporter] You don't seem very worried by what's going on. Are you?
[Saidy] We were stuck,
and we didn't even know where he would sleep.
Called up my mother in the middle of the night,
and true to her Lebanese hospitality, she said, "Sure you can bring him over,"
not knowing that our home
would be turned into the new center of the world,
as hundreds of journalists
camped outside,
as Henry Kissinger called up
to try to get him to move his ass.
And um, the rest is history.
[Wilson] The tournament stood for a lot more than a game.
This was the Cold War,
which itself was often described like a chess game,
with potential traps everywhere.
And lots of things were pawns in the bigger power struggle,
including chess itself.
After snatching the world title,
Bobby shot to stardom.
The king is dead!
[audience laughing]
Not yet, he isn't.
I'm sure the entire world knows the name Bobby Fischer by now.
He is the best chess player in the entire world.
How did Bobby Fischer beat you? He was a better player?
Yes, he is a better player.
[Wilson] But in one crucial way,
the Cold War wasn't like a chess game at all.
With chess, you know all the information at the start.
Nothing is hidden.
Nothing like cards, where you keep the cards close to your chest.
You're not relying on a dice roll.
You're not relying on luck of the draw.
You are staring at the question, and you are staring at the answer,
if only you see it.
[Wilson] Lasker's queen decides it's time to strike.
She boldly crosses into enemy territory.
But the black queen steps forward to defend her man.
The king is now safe in his corner,
guarded on all sides.
If you play chess, what would you do in this position?
Lasker says he knew this was the decisive moment of the game,
that he had to do something drastic.
He had five minutes to decide,
and, sadly, we don't have that time.
Lasker did this.
His queen is now face-to-face with the king.
Check.
And Sir Thomas did what most people would probably do.
He killed her.
It looks like Lasker made a fatal blunder.
It's not yet apparent
that this is the beginning of the end.
We've been teaching computers to play chess for decades,
feeding them billions of games.
And endowed them with memories that far surpassed ours.
While a human Grandmaster can consider tens of moves per decision,
a machine looks at tens of millions.
What would take you maybe years to figure out,
the computer could look at it within less than a second.
[Wilson] And on May 11th, 1997,
in the final tiebreaking game
between the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov,
and IBM's supercomputer, Deep Blue,
the machine prevailed.
We'd basically been beaten
by a giant calculator.
There is no psychological pressure
that can reverse this opponent.
Except, you know, if it's unplugged.
[Wilson] Human players, on the other hand, are prone to weakness.
The king didn't realize he'd walked into a trap,
and thus the perfect king hunt begins.
The knight gallops forward, putting the king in double check.
If the king retreats,
the next move would be checkmate.
So he only has one option.
And then Lasker attacks again.
And again.
Chased out of his kingdom, his queen abandoned.
When you pass the point of no return,
first, there's shock,
and then acceptance.
As computer power increased,
and as the computers played more against each other,
they would improve and improve.
Now, no human would really dare to take on a computer in a match at all,
because the computers are gonna win.
[Wilson] And in 2017,
a new kind of chess player
took the world by storm.
Its name was AlphaZero,
and it wasn't a supercomputer.
It could only consider a tiny fraction of the moves
of the mightiest chess engines,
but it had been taught very differently.
AlphaZero meant zero human knowledge.
[Wilson] It was just given the rules,
and then it had played itself,
over and over,
and over again.
[Regan] Forty-four million games at lightning-fast speed against itself.
At first, because it was random,
quite a lot of the games wouldn't even reach any conclusion,
'cause it wouldn't know how to checkmate, for example.
But, by chance, some of the games did reach a conclusion,
so it would look at the moves on the winning side
and try and play a bit more like that.
In nine hours of training,
it learned kind of the whole of human chess history.
[Wilson] And AlphaZero,
it didn't play like a computer at all.
It engaged in bold attacks and daring sacrifices,
like the Romantics.
And it seemed to follow some of the basic principles
laid out by the scientific school.
And, at the same time, it sometimes broke them,
because it didn't have any preconceived notion
that general rules should always apply.
When I was growing up, there were certain moves that we considered completely crazy.
And now computers have taught us that you can do these things
that for centuries were thought to just not be possible.
[Wilson] Computers didn't kill chess.
They fueled the greatest explosion of chess knowledge in history.
The number of Grandmasters has been going up,
and they achieve that high rank younger.
[Nakamura] In the past,
almost all the top chess players were from the former Soviet Union,
because that was where the top players were.
You had to be around the best players to obtain that experience.
[Wilson] But now, you just need an Internet connection.
I think Rubius has been putting in a lot of work off-stream as well,
because he's playing this very, very well.
[Wilson] And countries that don't have a history of competitive chess
are producing some of the world's best chess players.
[Nakamura] Countries like India.
You have countries like Iran, for example, as well.
Of course, even Norway. Prior to Magnus Carlsen,
they had no chess players, I would say, in the top 20 in the world.
It really has leveled the playing field, and you see that people can get good,
no matter where they are in the world or what the circumstances are.
[Wilson] Within the strict confines of the rules,
bound by just 64 squares,
the total number of unique chess games is estimated to be
around ten to the 120th power.
Or in plain English,
a thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion games.
More possibilities than there are grains of sand on Earth,
or dust particles in the Milky Way,
or atoms in the observable universe.
The beauty and I think the magic of the game is this fluidity.
With every move, the whole game changes.
You have to reconfigure, you have to keep looking at the board.
There's enough richness to it that you'll never be the perfect player.
And there's always ways to improve.
Even though I've spent much of my career playing the game
and I've spent many, many years studying it,
there's still a lot of "Aha" moments where I look at a game or I study,
and there's something even I have not seen before.
Chess has this addictive quality, I admit it.
I didn't get rich,
I didn't get famous,
but it was very satisfying to play a good game.
And I remember those moments with happiness.
[Wilson] After a series of forced moves,
the black king reaches the opposite end of the board
in the heart of the white kingdom.
With his royal grace,
the white king advances one step forward,
letting his rook,
which hasn't made a single move the entire game,
deal a mortal blow.
Checkmate.
[closing theme music playing]