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Chess has problems. Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level. Those people who really love chess, that devoted few who have given their lives to it and for whom chess really should be a great game? They're not getting a great game - and they haven't been getting one for a while.
Chess, it turns out, has been in a bit of a rut for some time. "If you look at chess history, chess has actually changed a lot over the years," says Zachary Burns, the founder of Ludeme Games, and a man who's spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. "It's continually been updated to adapt for the current needs of the people playing it. For example, at one time, it needed to be sped up, so the double pawn move was introduced and bishops were allowed to go much further. Chess has been changing forever, and it's only relatively recently the game has started to go stale because it's stopped changing. We're actually at a strange point in chess history. Emanuel Lasker predicted the sort of trouble we're having now more than a hundred years ago. He knew that if the game does not continue to evolve, we'd have problems."
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