Pawn stars: The 38th annual Grangemouth Chess Congress

Beneath Grangemouth town hall’s flickering art deco lights, 117 players are competing for supremacy. Five games are played over the weekend, each lasting up to four hours. The silence is not absolute. A cough goes round the room like a loud guest mingling at a subdued party; a yawn, too, circulates. One player's phone shrills and she scrabbles in her bag then rushes, mortified, for the exit. FIDE, the world chess federation, has a zero-tolerance policy regarding mobiles; if a player’s rings during a game, they lose.

Most of the games are taking place in the main hall, amid that unmistakable municipal smell of dust and polish. Each game is contested at a separate wooden table. The symmetry is pleasing. Looking down from the balcony, it could be a frozen frame of a Busby Berkeley musical, albeit one a good deal dowdier than the rest of his oeuvre.

Competitive chess can appear static: steam curls from coffee cups; someone blinks in slow motion; a hand reaches out, birdlike, and pecks up a pawn. The players sit hunched over the green-and-white board, hands cradling foreheads as if to hold in thoughts that have reached escape velocity. Look beneath the table and you begin to get a sense of what’s really happening. That’s where you see the jiggling feet, the waggling knees, physical outlets for the nervous energy produced by all those birling brains. It is said that during particularly anxious stages of a game, especially during ‘time trouble’ – having little time left on the clock to complete the remaining moves – a player’s heart rate can double.

Daniel Maxwell is a 19-year-old Aberdonian, and his purple Nikes are a blur as he plays his way to another victory. “I get incredibly nervous,” he says later. “I’m quite literally shaking.” He is a third-year psychology student who spends more time playing online chess – the accelerated five-minute variety known as ‘blitz – than revising. He is also into bodybuilding and has lost 20kg at the gym. There is an idea prevalent within the chess world that physical strength whets mental sharpness.

What makes Maxwell so nervous? “My expectations of myself. Once you get good results, you want to keep on winning. In the future I want to be a grandmaster.”

Why? “Grandmaster is the ultimate promotion. Earning the title shows hard work. Just like developing a six-pack shows hard work.”

One becomes a grandmaster by winning enough games to build a rating of at least 2,500 and performing strongly against at least three grandmasters in particular tournaments. Scotland has five grandmasters, 66 chess clubs and 2,265 registered competitive players. League matches take place during the week, and there is roughly one weekend tournament each month. The Scottish Championship, first staged in 1884, is the world’s oldest chess event, and offers a top prize of around £2,000. In Grangemouth, the prize money of £550 ends up being split four ways by the joint winners; at the apex of the game, godlike beings with ratings above 2,600 can make a very good living from tournament wins, appearance fees, writing and coaching, but most mortal players aren’t in it for the money.

They aren’t in it for the fame either. Though, thanks to the internet, chess has a global reach (one million unique visitors from 183 countries were, earlier this month, watching the Chess World Cup live from Siberia), the game is more or less invisible in the UK; its complexity and nerdy image makes it easy for the mainstream to dismiss or revile. “There’s something about British anti-intellectualism that makes us wary of people who want to think in their spare time,” says the Aberdonian grandmaster Jonathan Rowson.

Yet for those acolytes initiated into its mysteries, versed in its secret language of zwischenzugs and zugzwangs, chess can become a passion, even an addiction. “It’s a bug, a wonderful drug,” says one Scottish chess player; or, as the Dutch grandmaster Hans Rees once put it, “Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for.”

There is a beauty, certainly, in watching people play chess. We enjoy the sight of athletes playing tennis and dancers performing ballet, and there is something similarly uplifting about examining the faces of those deep in thought. You find a lot written there: serenity, pain, at times a kind of grace. And what chess offers, unlike physical disciplines, is the opportunity for children to take on adults and win. There is something undeniably moving about watching a schoolboy sitting across from an old greybeard, both of them utterly absorbed by the game. One of the players in Grangemouth is Vagif Razamanov, an eight-year-old from Baku, Azerbaijan, now living in Aberdeen; his father Vasif, also a chess player, works in the oil industry.

Vagif is a cute kid with dark brown eyes and a laser grin. His legs, as he sits and plays, don’t quite reach the floor. Those in the know say that he’s one of the best players of his age to emerge in Scotland in the last three decades. He learned to play two years ago, while visiting his grandfather in Azerbaijan. The former Soviet republic has a thriving chess culture; Garry Kasparov, regarded by many as the greatest player of all time, is from Baku; for Vagif, Kasparov’s example is inspiring. “I want to be a grandmaster,” he says. “I like playing chess so much and I don’t want to give up.”

On the other side of the room from Vagif, frowning down at his board as if it were an inscrutable foe, is Rudolph Austin, who is 75 years old and lives in Edinburgh. His hair is swept back from a face that would make Samuel Beckett appear unlined. The pockets of Austin’s suit jacket are full of cigarettes and old scoresheets and coins and newspaper articles. He suffers from hypertension and ringing in the ears, and says that sometimes his mind is in turmoil. Yet, even when he is feeling quite ill, he turns up to tournaments. “My urge to play,” he explains, “is very strong.”

He is an anxious man, running on caffeine and nicotine, constantly nipping outside to smoke after he has moved his pieces. Among staff in the Haymarket branch of Beanscene, where he visits and plays chess several times a day on a small portable board, he is known simply as Chessman. One of his rituals is to draw the Star of David on his scoresheet at the start of every game.

Austin’s first memory of chess is seeing his parents playing with red and white ivory pieces. This was in Italy during the Second World War. The family had gone there so that Austin’s father, a property owner, could take mud baths for his rheumatism. While they were abroad on holiday, Italy entered into an alliance with Germany, and the family from Edinburgh were not allowed to return home for three or four years. It was a traumatising experience, from which he has never quite recovered. They often went hungry. Austin remembers an attempt was made by a German officer to rape his mother and to have his father shot dead. Through these dark, fearful days, until the Nazis took the board, chess was a consolation and has remained so. “I have a craving for security, which I think chess provides,” he says. “Someone once said that the real motivation for playing chess is the wish to create order in a chaotic world. I think that’s possibly true.”

What is it about chess that means people need to play it rather simply want to do so? For Rowson, the 34-year-old grandmaster who won the British Championship every year between 2004 and 2006, one reason, often overlooked, “is that the game is utterly beautiful. It has enormous aesthetic charm that is invisible to those who don’t play. Once you get into the complexity of chess, you are suddenly transported into this world of geometry and symmetry and assymetry and flow. There’s something about the beauty of how things work, the aesthetics of logic, that lies right at the heart of the game and keeps people coming back for more.”

Rowson, originally from Aberdeen but now working for a thinktank in London, first won the Scottish Championship in 1999. The present Scottish champion is Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant, known as Keti, originally from the former Soviet republic Georgia but living since 1996 in Edinburgh. The only female grandmaster in the UK, she is 43 and has been playing since she was six. At 12, she left her home by the Black Sea to study chess at the Pioneer Palace, in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. A petite, polite woman, she is known as a sharp and aggressive competitor; Keti plays like a man, experienced players say, intending this as a great compliment.

“For me, it was never a question whether I wanted to play chess or not,” Arakhamia-Grant explains. “In Georgia, there is a tradition of women playing chess. We have had two female world champions, the best players are heroes, and you can read about chess on the sports pages of newspapers.

“I think it suited my personality. I was kind of introverted and capable of sitting for hours and studying play. Also, I am very competitive.

“For me, chess is very exciting. There is a lot of drama. You have to have very strong nerves. You have to keep control of your emotions. You use a lot of energy sitting at the board. In physical sports, you can express your emotions. In chess, it is all internal and intensive. A lot of players, after a game, they go for a run so they can get rid of the negative. If you lose, the worst thing is when somebody says, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s just a game.Because, at that moment, it feels like the end of the world.”

One man for whom chess is definitely not just a game is Geoff Chandler, a taxi dispatcher and well-known figure on the Edinburgh chess scene. Chandler is a rangy, restless man of 60 and has been obsessed with the game since he was 12. He tried to give it up in 1995, feeling he was getting too old to compete, but has since become hooked once more. His flat contains two untidy study areas dedicated to chess, books on the subject – some in Russian – piled up everywhere; above a desk hangs a framed portrait of the great American player Paul Morphy, who died in 1884.

Chandler has allowed a journalist to visit him at home in order to show how a chess player lives. He’s a good illustration because, although he is a strong player, rated 2001, he’s not a master; chess is not his living, but it is his life.

As he makes tea, he explains that, much to the displeasure of his wife, he has burned though a number of kettles and saucepans, leaving them on the hob and becoming distracted by chess. “I don’t care what’s happening in the world,” he explains.

“I’m just lost completely in a zone of moves and numbers.” He keeps chess boards behind the bars in several Edinburgh pubs.

Taking the mugs through to the living room, Chandler settles on the couch in front of the window, the afternoon sun making a halo of what remains of his bushy hair, and rolls a cigarette. There is a chess board on the coffee table and he often leans forward to move the pieces around in illustration of a particular point. Two black-and-white cats doze on the couch beside him; there is a third around somewhere. Chandler, had he been allowed, would have named them after his favourite chess champions – Fischer, Alekhine and Capablanca.

Chandler has no hestitation in describing himself as an “artist”. Playing chess, for him, is a creative act, which is why it can be mentally draining. “Every time you play a game of chess it’s like giving a blank canvas to Picasso and saying, ‘Paint me a masterpiece now’.” These days he mostly plays blitz online, on the Red Hot Pawn site, for which he is also a blogger. One of the last times he played over the board, he almost passed out with the strain. “I’ve not got the stamina for the third hour.”

It is difficult, when considering chess, to arrive at a definite conclusion as to what it actually is. A sport? A puzzle? What? “Ah,” Chandler grins, “you’re now on the subject of 1,000 forum threads. Alekhine said it was an art; Lasker said it was a fight; Botvinnik said it was a science. To me, it’s a game.” He chuckles. “It’s the game I love.”

For Chandler, there is no better feeling than grabbing a book and board and playing through the great games of the past, the chess equivalent of covering a classic song. He might, for example, recreate the moves of a game that took place in St Petersburg in 1914, enjoying the feeling of kinship to those Russian players who, though long dead, live on through their ideas. Chess is an ancient game, dating back to at least 600AD, and Chandler sees himself as part of a lineage of players, one mind connecting to the next, stretching back through the centuries.

Finishing his cup of tea, he suggests we visit the Edinburgh Chess Club, which is on the first floor of a tenement in Alva Street. Established in 1822, it is the oldest club in the UK and arguably the second-oldest in the world, behind Zurich. The club is a narrow, cosy space with a real fire and heavy maroon drapes, the walls decorated with black-and-white photographs of tweedy, bewhiskered players of the Victorian era. There are a dozen tables, each covered by a white tablecloth on which sits a chessboard. The atmosphere is elegant, formal and still.

“This is the place, eh?” says Chandler, unable to contain his excitement. He actually lived in the club for six years, working as the caretaker; his daughter was born in the analysis room.

David Archibald, the club curator, opens a wooden trophy cabinet and brings out a great treasure – the Scots Gambit Cup, won against the London Chess Club during a correspondence match that lasted for four years during the 1820s.

Archibald, who is 48 and has a taste for oratorical flourishes, says, “Beethoven was writing ‘Missa Solemnis’, Wellington would have been prime minister, Catholic emancipation was still a dream of Thomas Moore, and the Edinburgh Chess Club played a match with London by post.”

To spend time at the Grangemouth Congress and here in this temple of chess with Chandler and Archibald is to begin to understand just what it is about the game that has captured the minds of so many in Scotland and beyond – it is something to do with its cosmic vastness, its seemingly inexhaustible capacity to delight and to frustrate. Clocks may tick down and hearts may stop, but chess never really ends.

“There are more potential games of chess after ten moves,” Archibald explains, “than there are atoms in the known universe.”

Both men nod at this. “That’s it,” says Chandler. “That’s it.” n