No doubt you’ve heard by now about the s*x
and violence scandal that is rocking the world of chess. Our hero is not either of the combatants,
nor the Australian teen chess queen they were fighting for. It’s an English
blogger called Stephen Moss.

Writing for the Guardian Online,
Moss seems to be the only guy in the world not the least surprised that an
English chess grand master, Danny Gormally, would stride across a dance floor and either punch or push to the
ground Lev Aronian, a rival grand master, world number three, and described in the
Herald Sun as “the David Beckham of Armenia”. For the record,
the men clashed over the potential affections of a 19-year-old Australian-Filipino
chess siren, Arianne Caoili, who sounds like a piece of work, going by her
website.

But back to Moss. As the sporting world
reeled at such passion on the dance floor, Moss welcomed the whole fiasco, using it
as a springboard to present real chess: the sport of passion, s*xual references
and sporting champions with little income or recognition.

“A couple of months ago I tried to get a couple of editors interested in
the Chess Olympiad – an epic event involving more than 150 nations and several
thousand punchy chess players. Nil interest. It takes a good off-the-board bust up to get the juices going,” Moss writes.

“Let’s accentuate the
positive. The public has at last been given an insight into the true nature of
chess: an essentially Darwinian struggle for power and s*xual supremacy.
Grandmasters – young and frequently in search of a girlfriend but without the
money to buy a woman dinner or the ability to make any small talk beyond the
latest innovation in the Ruy Lopez (Steinitz Defence Deferred) – love to use
s*xual terminology to describe their games. They talk about
“rogering” their opponents … and worse. The notion of bondage –
tying up your opponent with a view to eventually killing the king – is central
to chess. For young men, chess is s*x by other means. If the public grasp this,
the game will surely have a bright future.”

(To follow the chess world’s ongoing
reaction the biggest story to hit their world for some time, we recommend The Closet Granmaster blog)