Blindfold Engame Visualisation (19/50)

#19, Bron 1929

Who gets to have the Best of Times?
(see BEV #18, BEV #17)

One of the things that chess players like to say about the game is that it is unique. In no activity can the old and young, men and women, black and white, rich and poor sit down opposite each other and compete on level terms.

One of the things that chess players don’t like to say at all is that reality just isn’t like this. Anybody can play, and yet competitive chess overwhelmingly remains the preserve of the white middle class male. Ageing white middle class men, to be exact.

People like your author, if truth be told.

There's a lot of toxic masculinity in chess.

Some real tonic masculinity, too. And wonderful people.

It's just a shame some of the toxic ones are so loud ‍♀️

— cleomina (@cleominaTTV) May 11, 2021

What a lot of chess players - i.e white men - will tell you is that women (or black folks, or … whichever group they’re dismissing at that particular moment, but let’s talk about women today) simply aren’t interested in chess. You don’t see them because they don’t like the game.

Except at @casualchess. I didn’t get to visit very often but always seemed to have a very large percentage of women attending whenever I did.

Oh and except in primary schools. Anybody who’s actually worked teaching chess to children under 11 can tell you, if you don’t go about explaining the game isn’t for them, girls can take the game with just as much enthusiasm as boys.

Then there’s the women and girls - from those with a public profile like Jack Monroe (story here)to the non-famous like Fanou (here) - who stopped playing because of sexual abuse that they experienced from within the game.

So, you know, maybe we should consider that the problem isn’t women but chess and the people who play it.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to all this, but at the very least we can listen when women like Cleomina talk about toxic masculinity within chess. We can recognise that for a lot of people the game isn’t the safe place that many of us can take for granted.

It’s not enough, but if we want everybody to have the chance to enjoy solving blindfold studies and everything else that comes with being a chess player, we have to make a start somewhere.

OUTCOME: Solved

RUNNING TOTAL: 16.5/19