Is Chess Inexpressive, or Have We Failed to Watch It?

On July 5, 2026, at the BCF hall in Purana Paltan, Dhaka, Grandmaster Ziaur Rahman collapsed during his game. He was Bangladesh's fifteen-time national champion, holder of the country's highest rating (2570). He died before reaching the hospital. The clock kept ticking; the position remained on the board. Chess, they say, is an inexpressive sport. That afternoon, the silence of the board spoke louder than any celebration. That silence is now at the center of a fresh debate. Naganethra Reddy, a former badminton player and motorsport sustainability professional working with Formula E, Extreme E, and the World Endurance Championship, called chess "one of the least expressive sports" she has ever watched. She asked how people watch, follow, and connect with the game. The comment has revived an old question: is chess a poor spectator product? I am Tamim Rahman. I have covered Bangladeshi chess since 2026, and my notebook holds every national championship result from 2026 onward. My thirty-five years on the beat tell me the accusation is half true. Physical expressiveness is low; that is by design. But the sport has replaced body language with another kind of signal — the eval bar, the clock, the face, the story. The problem is that Bangladesh never built the broadcast infrastructure to translate those signals. Between 2026 and 2026, Bangladesh did not host a single GM norm tournament. The Standard Chartered school tournament ran from 2026 to 2026 and then simply stopped. The federation survives on roughly Tk 11 lakh per year. With that budget, you cannot run a national championship properly, let alone install live evaluation bars and commentary. Spectators watch a static board, conclude the game is mute, and leave. That is not a failure of chess. It is a failure of presentation. The international evidence is clear. When Carlsen and Caruana's tiebreak was shown with eval bars and expert commentary in 2026, millions followed the drama. Nakamura's streams and the 2026 World Championship proved that personality and narration can make chess a show. Chess is not silent; it is we who have not learned to describe it. The counterintuitive point is this: the "chess is boring" critique is actually a useful signal. It tells us what casual viewers need — context, stakes, and human story. Bangladesh's Premier Division League signed fourteen foreign GMs in nineteen days in 2026, eleven of twenty top boards went to imports, and nobody told the story of the local juniors who lost their boards. That was drama, unreported. Ziaur Rahman's death is the sharpest expression of all. He needed chess for bread and butter until his last day. Rani Hamid still wins Olympiad games at 82. Niaz Murshed took the national title at 59, thirty-eight years after becoming South Asia's first GM. Manon Reja Neer won the 2026 national title at 14, undefeated. These are not statistics; they are expressions of a system's cost and a talent's hunger. My notebook still has no name after Enamul Hossain Razib, 2026. Seventeen years without a new grandmaster is not a talent drought; it is a sponsorship drought disguised as one. Until Bangladesh builds the broadcast culture that the game deserves, outsiders like Naganethra Reddy will keep calling chess inexpressive. The board can be silent, but the game never is. We simply have to learn the language.