A little less than a year and a half ago, HBO’s “Real Ƶ With Bryant Gumbel” profiled the remarkable rise of chess in St. Louis, bankrolled by wealthy philanthropist and controversial political donor Rex Sinquefield — who has made the city what has been called the worldwide capital of the game.
HBO’s first look discussed how Sinquefield has attracted numerous grand masters to not only play at the club, in high-profile tournaments, but also to live in St. Louis “on his dime.”
The show is back for Round 2, this time focusing on how the St. Louis Chess Club unexpectedly has flourished during the pandemic while the major sports have faced many obstacles. Chess’ success is fueled in large part by a rapid online growth of interest in the game, created in large part by people’s normal activities being curtailed and them looking for something else to do.
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Soledad O’Brien again is the correspondent, in a report that is part of the latest edition of “Real Ƶ” that first airs at 9 p.m. Tuesday and also will be available on HBO Max. This segment mixes new and old material, with most of the original content coming early in the 12-minute piece.
As was the case with HBO’s first look at the Chess Club, there is no mention of some of the controversies Sinquefield has been in locally regarding his political and other contributions.
The focus again is on the game, this time its rise during the pandemic. It is quite the contrast to the early days of COVID-19, which led to widespread shutdowns last spring.
“You said, ‘Boy, this is going to be a disaster,’” Sinquefield says of his outlook then. “And it looked like a disaster at first. We had to shut down all the big tournaments.”
But in the long run, the opposite has happened. The game’s rise in popularity has been sparked by an infusion of young players and YouTube commentators who have become celebrities themselves with the ascent substantially boosted by the success of the Netflix show “The Queen’s Gambit,” in which chess is a centerpiece.
“It was the year that chess, one of the world’s oldest games, tapped into the power of new media and somehow became all the rage,” O’Brien says.
Sinquefield talks about chess’ online growth being “hundreds of percent around the world.”
He says the game has enjoyed its biggest surge since American Bobby Fischer beat Russian Boris Spassky in a much-ballyhooed competition nearly half a century ago.
“Online chess is the perfect sport for the stay-at-home era,” O’Brien says.
And the St. Louis Chess Club has cashed in via its big presence in cyberspace.
“Chess boomed,” Sinquefield says. “In terms of increase in audience, we probably dwarfed every other sport.”
To that end, the club, in the Central West End, announced last fall that it is expanding threefold and much of that new space will be used for classrooms and tournament space.
“We have been successful beyond our wildest dreams,” Sinquefield says.