Latest news with #DavidHowell
CNN
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
Magnus Carlsen slams table in frustration after shock loss to Gukesh Dommaraju in ‘turnaround of the year'
Magnus Carlsen slammed his fist on the table in frustration after suffering a shock loss to defending classical chess world champion Gukesh Dommaraju at the 2025 Norway Chess tournament on Sunday. Nineteen-year-old Gukesh pounced on a rare mistake from Carlsen at Finansparken in Stavanger, Norway, to seal the 3-0 victory and secure his first classical victory over the five-time world champion. When Carlsen was forced to concede, the 34-year-old slammed his hand on the table in a surprise burst of emotion before shaking Gukesh's hand and leaving the venue quickly, skipping his media duties. The outburst caused a stunned reaction from the commentators with Carlsen usually known for his calm demeanor. Carlsen admitted afterwards that he was left confused by his Indian opponent's tactics. 'I don't completely understand what (Gukesh's) concept is here. It seems to me that I just have excellent play,' Carlsen said afterwards. For Gukesh, who became the youngest-ever world chess champion last year, it was a momentous victory and one which he didn't think would come. '99 out of 100 times, I would lose. Just a lucky day!' Gukesh said afterwards. 'First classical win against Magnus, I mean, not the way I wanted it to be, but OK, I'll take it.' British grandmaster David Howell called Gukesh's victory the 'turnaround of the year' given the nature of the comeback. He also praised the end of the game too. 'Focus. Brilliance. Raw passion, anger, Sportsmanship. This moment had it all,' Howell wrote on X. Carlsen still remains atop the Norway Chess standings despite the loss with four rounds of games left to play, with Gukesh moving up to third. The tournament has a total prize fund of approximately $148,000, with the winner taking home almost $62,000.
Telegraph
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Chess Masters: The Endgame, review: quietly compelling and full of chequered charm
Could the BBC succeed in making chess sexy? Not quite but they did make it pretty darned exciting. Chess Masters: The Endgame (BBC Two) attempted to exploit the game's popularity boom by turning it into TV entertainment. The result was quietly compelling and full of chequered charm. Recent years have seen a resurgence in a pursuit traditionally associated with bespectacled boffins in church halls. Schoolchildren found solace in chess during lockdown. Cheating scandals hit headlines. A sheen of showbiz glamour was added by Netflix drama The Queen's Gambit. Lending itself to online streams and mobile apps, chess has become an unlikely e-sport. TV execs have clearly taken note. This cleverly formatted contest followed '12 rising stars of the UK's booming chess community' (everything's a 'community' nowadays, isn't it?) as they battled it out in tense head-to-heads and tackled fiendish puzzles in their bid to be crowned champion. Expert commentary came from British grandmaster David Howell. Enthusiastic and engaging, he did an excellent job of explaining moves to relative beginners without patronising more experienced players. Howell could prove this promising show's main weapon. He was joined by chess coach Anthony Mathurin to analyse the motives behind the moves. When he appeared on The Traitors last year, Mathurin was banished before the midway mark. Presumably, he's better with rooks than Round Tables. Host Sue Perkins lent a dash of Radio 4 wit and a whiff of The Great British Chess Off. As always, she couldn't resist an innuendo, telling players: 'Your time starts when David whips out his bishop and pops it on the board.' Positively pawn-ographic. To counteract the game's geeky image, producers ramped up the theatrics. Chess was billed as 'the king of games' and 'war on a board'. Players were given gladiatorial nicknames such as 'Killer Queen' and 'Smiling Assassin'. One suspects these were coined by the programme makers, then reverse-engineered to fit the players, but let's not quibble. This was chess on TV for the first time since retro classics Play Chess and The Master Game. Players' personal stories provided human interest. We heard how ex-bouncer Nick, a self-styled 'big buff black guy', took up chess while serving jail time. The game enabled father-of-three Navi to connect with his children during his treatment for stage four cancer. All the female players – they weren't just plentiful, they were also the best – fondly recalled being taught to play by their fathers. This was a beguiling world of pinning and winning, castling and passing, laying traps and toppling kings. Tactical blunders were made. Checkmates followed. It was refreshing to watch a competition which rewarded strategic smart thinking, rather than backstabbing, attention-seeking or Spandex-clad physical feats. Matches were edited down to a few highlights, which might not please purists, but can be watched in full on iPlayer. Rapid-cut coverage kept the running time down to a snappy half-hour and the momentum high. Slo-mo replays and moody music hammed up the action. The atmospheric setting of Cardiff's Coal Exchange added a splash of Victorian splendour. Chess currently lays claim to be the world's fastest-growing sport, with six million Britons now playing regularly. This was squarely aimed at the new generation and about as dramatic as two brainboxes frowning at a board could be. TV shouldn't always have to shout to be heard and this was quietly thrilling.
Telegraph
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The chequered history of chess on TV
Around 605 million adults regularly play chess, according to United Nations figures. Add in the legions of younger players who found solace in the game during lockdown and follow it online and you have a huge, sedentary, screen-ready fanbase. All of which makes it more surprising that chess has never really checkmated television. Next week will see the latest attempt, in the form of the BBC's Chess Masters: The Endgame. Sue Perkins hosts what the broadcaster is calling a high-stakes chess contest, following 12 rising stars of the UK's booming chess community as they compete to be crowned Chess Champion. As the players face off over the board, UK Grandmaster and three-time British champion David Howell – a legend already online – provides expert commentary, alongside chess coach and former Traitors contestant Anthony Mathurin. The tone of the new show is very much The Great British Chess-Off: it hurls the viewer headlong into a slightly quirky community of chess nerds full of characters with nicknames you suspect have been invented by the programme makers, such as The Swashbuckler and The Unruly Knight. Whatever you make of it – I liked it – you can see the logic behind it. Chess should be prime factual entertainment grist: show the expertise and passion, the drama, in a way that appeals to both laymen and zealots, do it all with some Sue Perkins wit and a dab of Great British innuendo, and there's no reason why chess on TV shouldn't work as well as baking has. Against that there is the history of chess on television. It's been tried many times before but never really taken off. This viewer in his forties remembers well the school holidays TV litany of Why Don't You?, Battle of the Planets, The Red Hand Gang… and Play Chess. I've just looked up the slightly Stakhanovite Play Chess title sequence with its 'March of the Eccentrics' theme tune and its strutting pawns, and it has sent me into a nostalgic whirl of Trio biscuits, Peter Duncan and the Test Card. Play Chess, which ran from 1980 to 1987 but was then endlessly repeated, was presented by Bill Hartston, a chess champion and polymath who has recently re-emerged as a media star on Gogglebox. 'Play Chess,' he says, 'was on after a programme called, Why Don't You? of which the message was, 'Why don't you turn off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?' And our chess programmes got bigger audiences than they did. I was very happy with that – people ignoring their message and finding that, in fact, it was quite useful watching a chess programme on television.' Play Chess came off the back of The Master Game (1976 to 83), an innovative BBC Two series of chess tournaments. Bill Hartson calls it 'the best thing that's ever been shown on television on chess, by a long way,' but then, he was its presenter. 'The first chess programmes I did for the BBC was coverage of the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972. After that was over, we sat down with the producer and discussed what was wrong with chess on TV, including the series that we had just done. And what was basically wrong was that it was rather like an Open University programme of a person standing in front of a magnetic demonstration board and moving the pieces while lecturing on some game or other.' The problem was something inherent to chess and anathema to television – chess players are static and chess games take ages. TV can be anything but it can't be dull; a 1995 episode of Mr Bean had Rowan Atkinson's character using a televised chess game to try and send himself off to sleep. What TV chess needed was a little tech magic – producer Bob Toner and his team at BBC Bristol devised a technique using magnets to make the pieces on the demo board move by themselves – but it also needed to be competitive. Drama requires conflict. 'Bob Toner came up with this idea of playing the games completely normally, and then getting the players to record [in voiceover] their comments on various crucial passages,' says Hartson. 'And so each programme showed one game with an emphasis on the contest between the two players, what they were thinking at the time. It gave a real feeling of conflict about it. And it really worked.' The Master Game ran for eight series. In a TV Review for The Observer, no less an authority than Julian Barnes described it as the best drama on television. Still, as successful as it was, it was festooned with ageing white men and had limited appeal for a younger audience. Hartson says its demise was down to the inevitable waxing and waning of commissioning editors' interest as well as the rising cost of getting the best players to feature. British focus on chess peaked when our own Nigel Short played Garry Kasparov for the World Championship in 1993 – with Carol Vorderman presenting the coverage on Channel 4. 'That was as high as you could get,' says Hartson. 'There was nowhere to go from there.' But a combination of the launch of the hit Netflix chess drama The Queen's Gambit in 2020 – a lockdown hit – as well as a renewal of interest in the game during lockdown, led to a huge increase in chess's popularity. Google Trends show that searches for the word 'chess' skyrocketed when The Queen's Gambit launched that October, and from October 2020 to April 2022, saw its number of monthly active users double from around eight million to nearly 17 million. Live-streaming Twitch channels also proliferated during and after the pandemic, with the chess community meeting the general gaming audience and both of them finding something in the other's culture (41.2 million hours of chess was watched on Twitch in 2020). The upshot has been that chess has become a huge e-sport – on February 14, Global esports powerhouse Team Liquid announced the signings of not just one, but two superstars of chess, in the form of five-time World Champion and world number-one Magnus Carlsen and the 2018 challenger, world number-two Fabiano Caruana. It was only a matter of time before someone on mainstream broadcast television would see all of this as a seam to be mined, and that someone is Camilla Lewis, Executive Producer of Chess Masters. 'I've got four kids and my third child had a really difficult time during the pandemic,' she says. 'What helped her get through it at the time was she played endlessly on I realised that she wasn't the only gorgeous, nerdy girl in the world and actually, there were quite a lot of people out there playing chess in her age group – I'd always thought it was all about old white men. That was a terrible mistake because chess is cross-cultural, cross-class, cross-gender, cross-everything.' Yet it wasn't across television. 'What I realised fast was that this was a whole community that wasn't really being shown. As a programme maker, you're always looking for what can combine people: where is there a natural place where things happen and people care?' In particular, Lewis wanted to bring in figures from the world of chess commentary, where individuals make content of themselves not playing chess, but talking about other people doing it. She had produced Grand Designs for seven years. She had seen how someone like Kevin McCloud's obvious enthusiasm could bring an audience into a subject they didn't know was fascinating. 'When you do shows like that, you realise all you need to put on television is real passion. Then you can construct around it a format. But the truth is, you have to start with something genuine.' In David Howell, a British Grandmaster, she has her chess McCloud. He is a brilliant communicator with a gift for exegesis and just the man for the job. Still, Lewis concedes that in the end, this latest attempt to bring chess to TV wouldn't exist without TV drama itself. The success of The Queen's Gambit remains modern TV chess's killer first move. 'The wonderful thing about The Queen's Gambit is that it starts with a match and stays with a match for a terribly long time,' Lewis says. 'And yet it engaged a huge amount of viewers who don't play chess. It proved entirely what I thought: if you're passionate and committed to a subject matter and you can bring people into it and not be exclusive about it, then you can engage a hugely wide audience.' And now, like any good chess player, she has to wait and see how that strategy plays out. Will chess on TV pin and win, or will it prove to be a fool's mate once again? Let's play.
