Autumn 2026: A Game Only Exists Once Someone Writes It Down

In the autumn of 2026, an entire block of collective housing in Hanoi gathered around a transistor radio, waiting for the announcer to read out the score of the world chess championship rematch. The number arrived about two days later than the rumour.

Two days. To a fourteen-year-old learning openings from hand-copied books, that gap felt like an injustice. It also turned out to be the longest lesson of my life: speed and truth are always separated by a distance, and that distance is rarely closed for free.

When information has to walk

In 2026 the country had only just crossed the threshold of Doi Moi, and the sports information line was as thin as thread: a few newspaper issues a week, a digest translated from foreign material, some radio broadcasts, and hand-written bulletins pinned up at the chess club. No network, no live scoreboard, no one relaying move after move. A game played in London took weeks to become a single line of text in Hanoi.

The 2026 rematch between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov fell exactly into that window. The first half was played in London from late July; the second half moved to Leningrad in September. Kasparov — who had taken the title from Karpov in Moscow in November 2026 — defended it 12.5 to 11.5 over 24 games, even though Karpov had moved ahead early on.

In Hanoi we did not receive those numbers at once. We received them drop by drop.

The only memory a chess game has

In a small chess club there was a hard-covered notebook. Every time news arrived from abroad, the person in charge opened it and copied out: the date, the two players' names, the score, and, if there was time, the number of moves.

That notebook was our entire data infrastructure. It had no backup. It had no cross-check. If the person in charge was busy that day, the game vanished from the history of an entire town.

The 2026 metric set fit into four things: number of games, score, number of moves, and thinking time written in the margin of the scoresheet. No expected-goals equivalent, no engine match rate, no player valuation. Yet the architecture was identical to every data system I have worked with since: a chain of evidence is only as trustworthy as the signatures on each link.

And this is what I carried with me through every analysis desk for the next forty years: a game that was never written down does not exist. That holds in the practical sense, not the philosophical one. It cannot be verified, argued over, or passed on. It survives only as a story told on a doorstep, and sooner or later retold with one move wrong.

There are players the world forgets, but data never forgets them — on one condition: someone has to write their names down in time.

The kind of bulletin that is complete and hollow at once

The most surprising thing I learned did not come from correct numbers. It came from blank spaces.

Once, a bulletin about a round arrived late and was missing the result of one board. Nobody knew why. So in the club, people started guessing: that board was probably drawn, probably nothing worth noting. Years later, when someone asked again, the default answer had become "there was nothing in that game." A blank space had turned into a conclusion, and the conclusion outlived the evidence.

That is the kind of bulletin I have met again and again all my life: full of headlines, full of dates, full of names, and containing not a single fact that can be checked. It looks valid. It is not empty in form, only in substance. And the trap sits somewhere else entirely: a later reader looks at it, sees silence, and concludes that the event never happened.

The absence of a line in a bulletin is never proof that the line does not exist. It is only proof that somebody did not manage to write it down in time.

Those two days of delay that felt so unjust to me at fourteen were, in hindsight, not a defect of the system. They were the system. The delay was the price of verification — what people today call a quality gate. Remove it, and you gain speed, and lose exactly the thing that should have been protected.

When the hall is empty, the true value of a person begins to speak. In chess, that moment is when only paper and pen remain. For us in Hanoi that year, it was the moment the hard-covered notebook was opened, and a player was resurrected in the memory of people who had never seen him sit at a board.

What remains

Nearly four decades later, the result of a game reaches me in under a second. The scoresheet is recorded automatically, signed automatically, stored automatically in three different places. The distance between speed and truth has never been narrower.

It has also never been easier to forget.

Having more data does not answer the old question: did anyone actually sign that sheet, or is a program simply talking to itself?

I light a candle for data. But I always let the flame of emotion light the way to the question.