Pawn stars: Scots chess players are passionate about their game

Beneath Grangemouth town hall’s flickering art deco lights, 117 players are competing for supremacy. Five games are played over the weekend, each lasting up to four hours. The silence is not absolute.

A cough goes round the room like a loud guest mingling at a subdued party; a yawn, too, circulates. One player’s phone shrills and she scrabbles in her bag then rushes, mortified, for the exit. FIDE, the world chess federation, has a zero-tolerance policy regarding mobiles; if a player’s rings during a game, they lose.

Most of the games are taking place in the main hall, amid that unmistakable municipal smell of dust and polish. Each game is contested at a separate wooden table. The symmetry is pleasing. Looking down from the balcony, it could be a frozen frame of a Busby Berkeley musical, albeit one a good deal dowdier than the rest of his oeuvre.

Competitive chess can appear static: steam curls from coffee cups; someone blinks in slow motion; a hand reaches out, birdlike, and pecks up a pawn. The players sit hunched over the green-and-white board, hands cradling foreheads as if to hold in thoughts that have reached escape velocity.

Look beneath the table and you begin to get a sense of what’s really happening. That’s where you see the jiggling feet, the waggling knees, physical outlets for the nervous energy produced by all those birling brains.

It is said that during particularly anxious stages of a game, especially during ‘time trouble’ – having little time left on the clock to complete the remaining moves – a player’s heart rate can double.

Daniel Maxwell is a 19-year-old Aberdonian, and his purple Nikes are a blur as he plays his way to another victory. “I get incredibly nervous,” he says later.

“I’m quite literally shaking.” He is a third-year psychology student who spends more time playing online chess – the accelerated five-minute variety known as ‘blitz – than revising. He is also into bodybuilding and has lost 20kg at the gym. There is an idea prevalent within the chess world that physical strength whets mental sharpness.

What makes Maxwell so nervous? “My expectations of myself. Once you get good results, you want to keep on winning. In the future I want to be a grandmaster.”

Why? “Grandmaster is the ultimate promotion. Earning the title shows hard work. Just like developing a six-pack shows hard work.”

One becomes a grandmaster by winning enough games to build a rating of at least 2,500 and performing strongly against at least three grandmasters in particular tournaments. Scotland has five grandmasters, 66 chess clubs and 2,265 registered competitive players. League matches take place during the week, and there is roughly one weekend tournament each month.

The Scottish Championship, first staged in 1884, is the world’s oldest chess event, and offers a top prize of around £2,000. In Grangemouth, the prize money of £550 ends up being split four ways by the joint winners; at the apex of the game, godlike beings with ratings above 2,600 can make a very good living from tournament wins, appearance fees, writing and coaching, but most mortal players aren’t in it for the money.

They aren’t in it for the fame either. Though, thanks to the internet, chess has a global reach (one million unique visitors from 183 countries were, earlier this month, watching the Chess World Cup live from Siberia), the game is more or less invisible in the UK; its complexity and nerdy image makes it easy for the mainstream to dismiss or revile.

“There’s something about British anti-intellectualism that makes us wary of people who want to think in their spare time,” says the Aberdonian grandmaster Jonathan Rowson.

Yet for those acolytes initiated into its mysteries, versed in its secret language of zwischenzugs and zugzwangs, chess can become a passion, even an addiction.

“It’s a bug, a wonderful drug,” says one Scottish chess player; or, as the Dutch grandmaster Hans Rees once put it, “Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for.”

There is a beauty, certainly, in watching people play chess. We enjoy the sight of athletes playing tennis and dancers performing ballet, and there is something similarly uplifting about examining the faces of those deep in thought.

You find a lot written there: serenity, pain, at times a kind of grace. And what chess offers, unlike physical disciplines, is the opportunity for children to take on adults and win.

There is something undeniably moving about watching a schoolboy sitting across from an old greybeard, both of them utterly absorbed by the game. One of the players in Grangemouth is Vagif Razamanov, an eight-year-old from Baku, Azerbaijan, now living in Aberdeen; his father Vasif, also a chess player, works in the oil industry.

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