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The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
BBC Two's Chess Masters: The Endgame divides opinions as winner is crowned
BBC Two's Monday evening show Chess Masters: The Endgame reached its final this week amid a continuing debate between experts, who found it patronising, and social players, novices and children who enjoyed its light touch and focus on personalities. The series was placed in a testing environment, the 8pm slot, sandwiched between the intellectual heavyweights Mastermind and University Challenge. Viewer numbers, as supplied by Broadcast, peaked in the first week at 890,000, then gradually dipped to a low of 535,000 on Easter Monday before rebounding to 655,000, a 5.5% share of the viewing audience, for the final week. However, Charlie Bunce, director of programmes for the series production company Curve Media, said in an email to that the first episode had attracted just under 1.2m viewers, describing that as 'a great success', and that in the rest of the series the programme had 'held its share'. has a full pictorial report on the series. The grandmaster presenter, David Howell, created innovative challenges for contestants, including pawn races, memory tests set by his friend Magnus Carlsen, puzzles involving checkmates in one, two, three, four and five moves, and mini-simultaneous exhibitions, all part of the elimination process to produce a single winner. English Chess Federation sources believe that the decision whether to commission a second series is in the balance. BBC policy is often to allow a new show a couple of series to find its target audience. The Richie v Thalia final was decided when the older player, a piece up, chose 1 Qf2? in the diagram, got into time trouble, and was beaten. There is now an entire 32-page thread on the English Chess Forum about Chess Masters, with its detractors complaining about excessive hype by Anthony Moturin and the difficulty of following the puzzle solutions, while its advocates praise the soft approach needed to bring new players to the game. What do Guardian readers think? Tell us in the comments section. Following Freestyle successes for Carlsen, the world No 1, and setbacks for the Indians led by the 18-year-old world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, the next major tests in classical chess are approaching. On Wednesday the Superbet Chess Classic Romania starts in Bucharest, with world top 11 players Gukesh, Fabiano Caruana, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, Alireza Firouzja and Wesley So all in action. Bucharest will be followed by Norway Chess at Stavanger, starting on 26 May, where the six competitors in a double-round all-play-all are Carlsen (Norway), Hikaru Nakamura and Caruana (US), Gukesh and Arjun Erigaisi (India) and Wei Yi (China). Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Each will have an individual motivation. Carlsen will want to show continued classical supremacy, a strong Nakamura result will provide impetus for him to qualify for the 2026 Candidates, Gukesh will need to prove that he really deserves his world crown, Caruana will aim to restore his previous No 2 status, while Erigaisi and Yi will try to confirm their places among the super-elite. Meanwhile, April has been a good month for England's best players. Nikita Vitiugov, the former Russian who is now England No 1, scored 2.5/3 in the competitive German Bundesliga. Shreyas Royal, 16, England's youngest grandmaster, achieved solid 2500+ performances at Reykjavik, Iceland, and Menorca, Spain, while Supratit Banerjee, 11, surpassed a 2300 rating and so qualified for the Fide Master title. At home, GM Peter Wells won the English Senior 50+ championship while WIM Natasha Regan captured the women's crown. Paul Townsend and WGM Sheila Jackson took the 65+ titles. 3970: 1 Qa6 Na5 (to stop 2 Qb7 mate) 2 Qb7+! Nxb7 3 Na6+ and if Ka8 4 Ndxc7 mate or Kc8 4 Ne7 mate. Richie v Thalia: 1 Qg6! (threat 2 Rf8+! Kxf8 3 Qf7 mate) Qd8 2 Rf7 Bf6 3 Nd7! with no reasonable defence for Black.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Chess Masters: The Endgame review – so dull it's almost unwatchable
Appropriately enough, I suppose, what Chess Masters: The Endgame is doing in the television schedules is a bit of a puzzle. The Queen's Gambit, the adaptation of Walter Tevis's 1983 novel about a chess prodigy that became an unexpected hit for Netflix, made a star out of Anya Taylor-Joy and brought the game to wider public attention. But that was five years ago. The flurry of interest it roused in the subject has long since fallen back to normal levels. Chess Masters has no moment to capitalise on, except for what it assures us is 'Britain's booming chess community', 12 of whose 'rising stars' compete over eight episodes to, well, beat the other 11 at chess. This has clearly presented the producers of the show with a number of problems, none of which has been successfully solved. There is the question of how you make an essentially silent, cerebral game telegenic and accessible. They have hired a presenter with glasses to acknowledge the intellectualism of the pursuit, but made it Sue Perkins to try to give warm, Bake Off vibes too. But it is still inescapably people frowning over an abstract strategy board game, not constructing model cities out of profiteroles or coaxing clouds of pistachio and rose-flavoured cakes out of the oven like culinary gods. They have provided two sub-presenters – grandmaster and three-time British champion David Howell plus chess coach and former Traitors contestant Anthony Mathurin – to explain what is going on, but have then run scared of allowing them to do so. We get a hurried handful of descriptions of games' pinch points in each episode ('Active back rank … strong centre … triple stack … sleeping pieces, retreating queens … and that's a pin and win') that are too fast for the ignorant (Hi!) to understand and too basic to be useful to anyone else ('That's what's known in chess as a blunder'). And Mathurin's effortful enthusiasm for the camera is almost unwatchable. The contestants have, as ever, been chosen with an eye primarily on their backstories. Like 56-year-old Nick, who discovered the salvatory properties of the game while in prison and now runs chess clubs in Charlton and Greenwich, to try to spread the word. And 46-year-old Navi, who picked up his previous hobby again when he was diagnosed with stage-four cancer (he is now in remission) and found it the perfect mental escape from the world of appointments and treatment. He and his children all play together now, which is all lovely, but doesn't make things much more interesting to watch. All the candidates have been lumbered with embarrassing nicknames. I presume this was a producer's idea too, partly because not one sounds as if it has sprung up organically and partly because I simply cannot believe there are a dozen sentient adults in the world who prefer to be known in chess competitions as 'The Unruly Knight' (34-year-old Cai – a classically trained actor, who says chess gives him discipline, though he apparently also thrives on 'chaotic play'; God, you never know where you are with actors), 'The Chess Princess' (26-year-old chess content creator Lula, who was actually inspired by The Queen's Gambit to give the game a try) or 'The Unrelenting Warrior' (Navi). The first two episodes focus on the first six contestants as they go head-to-head in matches held in the ballroom of Cardiff's former coal exchange, then compete to solve chess puzzles (set by Howell) in the fastest time possible. As he gravely inspects each board and the participants wait to hear the fateful words 'Puzzle complete!' or 'Puzzle incomplete!' it is all faintly reminiscent of the IT Crowd episode when Moss gets involved with 'street Countdown' ('Gimme one of those sweet, sweet consonants'). The encroaching bathos is not helped by the insistence that winners ascend to the 'balcony of dreams' (the ballroom's balcony) while losers wait elsewhere for their chance to avoid elimination. Chess Masters: The Endgame could have been gentle and charming if somebody involved had had some faith in the game, in the potential for people to be interested in explanations of its finer points, or allowed Perkins off the leash a bit to make more jokes – yes, even in the face of such a terribly serious game! Instead, it feels thin, tired and scared. Let's have the courage of your convictions next time, people, and, if you have none, that's absolutely fine. Just don't bother at all. Chess Masters: The Endgame aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now
