The Ledger of Empty Squares: What the Camera Never Recorded in Chess

The Ledger of Empty Squares: What the Camera Never Recorded in Chess

— Towhid Biswas, Saint Petersburg

Last week a document landed on my desk. Eight chapters, each followed by the same sentence: "Insufficient information." No player's name, no event, no opening, no rating, no date. When the first stage of an analysis pipeline comes back empty, the second stage can say only one honest thing — nothing can be said. I have been reading chess scoresheets for thirty-nine years, but I had never had such a blank page in my hands. And yet it felt familiar, because Bangladesh's chess has been writing exactly this kind of scoresheet for a long time — one where the squares are drawn, but nothing is written in them.

One line kept returning on the last page: "No information point was recorded in the first stage." This is not a technical glitch; it is a mirror. Turn it toward our chess administration and the same sentence comes back — nothing was recorded in the first stage, so the second stage cannot balance the books. If a game is not recorded, it cannot be counted; what cannot be counted draws no money; what draws no money keeps no coach. An empty square is never merely an empty square — it is a hole in the ledger.

Looking into this mirror from Saint Petersburg is not comfortable. Here chess is a profession — there are salaries, schools, coaches, state clubs, pensions. In Dhaka the federation's annual budget is roughly eleven lakh taka — less than a single franchise cricketer's bat deal. One game, two pitches. On one pitch there are books; on the other there is only memory. I hold the two systems side by side, not with an outsider's eye but a familiar one.

The first page of my notebook is from 2026. That year, in Dhaka, a teenager became South Asia's first grandmaster — Niaz Murshed, a full year before India's Viswanathan Anand. Newspapers were the only witness then, and I was one of the writers of that witness. I thought it was a beginning. But the beginning bent two ways in two countries. India turned that moment into a machine — schools, scholarships, coaches, tournaments, jobs, federation salaries. We turned that moment into a statue — receptions, honours, photographs, and then silence. A statue keeps memory but does not produce the next generation. That is why today, writing about the missing sixth grandmaster, I must keep returning to my 2026 notebook — because that is where our ledger was opened, and no one closed it; we only forgot to keep writing in it.

Now let us take the ledger of empty squares. Five grandmasters. Seventeen years waiting for the sixth. No regular calendar of home norm-tournaments since 2026. School chess activity is nominal — on paper, not on the schedule. Roughly eleven lakh taka a year in the federation's hands. Read these four numbers together and one sentence stands up: the problem is not talent, it is employment. What makes Bangladesh lose chess is not a lack of talent but a lack of jobs. Parents who send a child into engineering are not cultural traitors; they are making a rational financial decision. When chess cannot pay the month's rent, leaving the board is not folly, it is necessity.

In July 2026 the country's most decorated player, Ziaur Rahman, died of a heart attack at the board — a fifteen-time national champion, and until his last day the money from playing was part of his livelihood. I want to read that sentence slowly. The most decorated player in the country still had to play chess for bread and butter, because beyond chess he had nothing. Into the same ledger go fourteen-year-old Manon Reja Neer, who won the national title undefeated, and Niaz Murshed, who took his seventh title at fifty-nine. And Rani Hamid, past eighty, still winning Olympiad games. These four names are four columns of one ledger — hope, bill, memory, endurance. I refuse to make Neer a lone saviour. I keep him as evidence that a pipeline is possible. But who funds him, who coaches him, and what happens to him at twenty-two if nobody answers — those are the real sentences.

Let me speak of two pitches. In 2026 my own city hosted the football World Cup — eleven cities, fan zones, eighty-thousand-seat stadiums, and a camera on every action. In September of that same year I travelled to the 43rd Chess Olympiad in Batumi, where China won both the men's and women's titles — the first federation to sweep both since the Soviet era — and a hall of more than 180 federations held almost no cameras. Bangladesh sent a five-board open team and a women's team leaning on Rani Hamid, then in her late seventies. Two events, one year, and how much each was seen is the real difference. The pitch the camera does not capture is the pitch that disappears from history in equal measure. Since then I have built my essays around absence — the empty seat, the unlit board, the sponsor who never came. I open with a scene the reader could never have watched, then widen toward the people who were there. Editors noticed that my pieces stopped leading with results.

2026 emptied every stage I had. In August I commentated the FIDE Online Olympiad from my Saint Petersburg kitchen — an India-Russia final that ended not with checkmate but with a disconnection; both teams were declared joint gold, and thousands of fans asked whether a result is a result if nobody touches a board in the same room. In Dhaka the Premier Division Chess League went dark, and players with day jobs stopped receiving match fees. That July I interviewed them about rent. Nobody wanted tactics that day; everyone wanted to know they were being heard. My prose went quiet, and I stopped using the word "battle."

For years I thought the story was about the missing sixth grandmaster. Now I understand the story is more uncomfortable than that. We could not fill the gap, but the bigger problem is that we cannot even keep the accounts of what we have. That empty document on my desk was that discomfort written on paper. I will not sit with the complaint everyone writes — "not one grandmaster in seventeen years." My question is different: why do we have no norm-tournament calendar, why does school activity stall on paper, why is the federation budget below a bat deal? These are questions of structure, not talent — and structure's accounts are balanced with numbers, not with memory. The boy who leaves the board at twenty-two is not lost because he lacked talent; he is lost because there was no salary for him.

One cricket comparison is enough in this piece, and it is about money and infrastructure — never sentiment or national character. Then we return to chess's own institutional facts. Chess in Bangladesh is not a hobby; it is a small industry whose income, expenditure, employment and training are all countable. The curious thing is that we can do the accounting, but we do not. And a game that does not keep its own books attracts no investment.

The closing image is a freeze-frame. In an old page of my notebook, a name from 2026, and beside it an empty square from today. Between them, thirty-nine years, five grandmasters, eleven lakh taka, and countless names who became engineers. If anyone still asks why Bangladesh cannot produce a sixth grandmaster, the answer is not found by looking at talent. It must be sought in budgets, schools, jobs and the norm calendar. And if this piece changes anything, it will come from counting an empty square honestly — because the pitch that lies outside the camera has no reason to lie outside history. Two pitches, one year, and the quiet math of belonging — perhaps in the next generation's scoresheet, no square will be left blank.