However, nearly every sport requires some type of physical exercise. In fact, people call some types of sports matches games. For example, the average person would call a competition between two baseball or football teams a game, not a match.
In order to answer it, allow me to digress and join me in a walk down my memory lane. The question, “Is chess a sport?” can be debated at length and there really is no definitive answer that will be agreed upon by everyone. While chess is a recreational activity for most, whether chess constitutes as a sport or not has been the subject of many debates in recent years. While it might seem like a useless discussion at first, it actually has real-world implications for chess players and the game as a whole — public funding being the most important.
Vidit Gujrathi, for example, had confessed to this newspaper that he had a phase where he thought his career was over after seeing the instant success players like Gukesh and Pragg were getting. His one-time roommate, Srinath Narayanan, is also among Aravindh’s admirers. Srinath gushed at length in an interview with The Indian Express about how Aravindh would walk into games at the Asian U20 tournament in Uzbekistan with barely any overnight prep and still take down exceptionally strong players.
According to Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, players can burn up to 6’000 calories a day while playing in a tournament. Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player look at this now can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Kasparov and Karpov contested three further closely fought matches in 1986, 1987 and 1990, Kasparov winning them all.115 Kasparov became the dominant figure of world chess from the mid-1980s until his retirement from competition in 2005.
This makes it a very fair game, and one that is highly respected by those who enjoy competition. These rules don’t change based on a player’s win-loss ratio or who they choose to compete against. In this way, chess players and athletes are very similar. Regardless of what was happening inside his head, the brand of chess he was playing on the board was causing heads to turn. After the event ended, grandmaster Pravin Thipsay remarked that Aravindh’s victory over first runner-up Anish Giri at Prague reminded him of the legendary Savielly Tartakower. “Tartakower had the ability and skills to spring surprises from harmless looking positions.
However, broaden that perspective, and you’ll find entities like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) categorizing chess under the umbrella of sports, earmarking it for events like the World Mind Sports Games. Those opposed to chess being considered a sport also argue that just because an activity is competitive does not automatically classify it as a sport. Such critics cite activities such as Math Olympiad and Debate Meets that are considered highly competitive, yet are clearly not sports. As chess is recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), it could be part of the Olympic games in the future. The hosting country can add some sports to be part of the Olympic games.