Online chess is the ultimate lockdown sport

How have you been filling these listless homebound hours we’ve been given by the government? I’ve been frittering them away playing online chess, and it seems I’m not alone. The Economist reports that traffic on chess.com, the leading chess website, has more than doubled during lockdown. Log on at any time and you’ll find tens of thousands of games in progress.

Once upon a time, in that lost age before the world wide web, chess players had to get dressed and leave the house to feed their habit. Now, in our brave new virtual world, those days are long gone. Today anyone with an internet connection can play ad infinitum, against an endless array of players from all around the world. Simply fire up your computer and away you go.

Whatever time you log on they’re always there, your faceless fellow addicts, huddled over their laptops. Day and night have no meaning in this worldwide netherworld. If it’s midnight in London it’s mid-afternoon in LA and early morning in Singapore. You can play around the clock and it won’t cost you a penny. Time is the only thing you stand to lose. Days drift by and nothing ever changes. The game means nothing. It teaches you nothing. There is no greater waste of time, no greater waste of life, than chess.

Online chess is the ultimate lockdown sport. It has been entirely unaffected by the virus. Simultaneously remote and intimate, the game is utterly immune. Indeed, if anything it seems there are even more players out there now than ever before. Individuals come and go but no one really cares. There are no personalities in cyberspace.

When you sign up you register your nationality and a little flag appears beside your name, but this detail is irrelevant.