7 Reasons Why Elitism Accusations In Chess Are Vastly Exaggerated

In the previous post on this blog, I made an overview of the events in 2020 that led to the real boom of online chess and its unprecedented popularity.

Unfortunately, as with almost everything happening online, 1 this boom couldn’t have gone without its share of outrage and drama. Due to the fact that some chess players weren’t quite receptive to the influx of the new/inexperienced players in the chess community, 2 it became increasingly common to refer to them as “gatekeeping elitist”, a term that can roughly be translated as “a**holes who think they are better than other people because they are experienced/good at a certain activity and who would like to prevent anyone new from taking up the same activity just because they are bad at it”. 3

Now, even though I definitely agree there are certain chess players who fit that exact description, I think that we are talking about a relatively small minority and that elitism accusations in chess have gotten out of hand. I think that the negative tendencies connected to the online world, the attention economy we live in, our habit to look everything in black & white perspective have blown the stories of elitism out of proportions.

In this article, I will come to the defence of elitism in chess and try to explain why I think elitism accusations in chess are vastly exaggerated.