Vietnamese Chess in 2026: A Move in the Silence

Hanoi, late December 2026. A competition hall inside a district culture house, four rows of chess boards pushed close together, yellowed fluorescent tubes overhead. Apart from the sound of pieces striking wood and the clatter of mechanical clocks, there is nothing else. No loudspeakers, no announcer, no spectators. Three reporters, two officials taking minutes, and forty games running at the same time.

I sit in the last row, writing every move into a squared notebook. For the first two hours I say nothing. People say girls know nothing about tactics. So I write for them to read.

Inside that room, everything was measurable: the number of moves, the minutes left on each clock, the pieces left on each board. Almost nobody measured. Measuring requires staying behind after the game ends, copying the scoresheet, checking every move against the board. In Vietnam in 2026, staying behind was not part of anyone's plan.

A wide but flat chess culture

Vietnamese chess entered 2026 with an obvious paradox. The grassroots base was wide: most provinces had clubs, secondary schools ran internal tournaments, and in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City coaching classes opened regularly at children's culture houses. A wide base, however, does not produce a peak. The country had no grandmaster at all, and the number of players sent abroad to compete could be counted on one hand.

Study material was thin and lopsided. Chess books printed locally were mostly translations from Russian, reissued in small runs, and largely devoted to openings and beautiful combinations. The endgame, the driest part and the part that decides most games, had almost nothing decent available in Vietnamese. Players copied model games by hand, drew boards on paper, and passed around thin, yellowed sheaves of notes.

In late 2026 the 31st Chess Olympiad took place in Moscow. It was the world's largest measuring stick, and for most Vietnamese players it stood at a distance measured in geography as much as in strength. At continental level, the Philippines, Indonesia and China had already pulled far ahead. China had a centralised training system and regular international slots for its juniors. Vietnam had a movement, a few good coaches, and a great many self-taught young players.

The generation then at its physical peak consisted of those born in the early 1970s, such as Tu Hoang Thong, followed by much younger faces like Dao Thien Hai, Hoang Thanh Trang and Nguyen Anh Dung, the group expected to carry Vietnamese chess beyond the grassroots stage.

Reading the board: triangles and the clock

On three evenings before the final round, I copied the complete scoresheets of the national championship into my notebook. Of the 26 games I sat through from start to finish, 17 went past move 40, and 11 reached an endgame with at least three pawns a side. In that group of 11, only four were decided by a clear plan, one where the objective of each move could be pointed to. The other seven collapsed after errors falling between moves 45 and 60, precisely when each clock had dropped below ten minutes.

The real strength of Vietnamese players in 2026 lay in the middlegame, not in the opening and not in the endgame. With the board still crowded and the diagonals still open, they calculated quickly and bravely. Trades that opened files, pawn sacrifices to clear a bishop's path, rooks swung onto the seventh rank, all of it was seen many moves ahead.

As the board emptied, the picture changed. I redrew the games on squared paper, shading the squares that knights and bishops crossed in the final 20 moves. In the wins by the younger group, the shading formed triangles pointing toward the queenside, where a passed pawn sat and the enemy king stood exposed. In the losses, the shading settled into horizontal lines running back and forth between two files, leading nowhere in particular.

That geometry says something very concrete: a shortage of endgame technique, not a shortage of talent. A player who does not know how to walk the king to the right square before pushing a passed pawn will be winning on move 35 and drawing on move 55. A great many games at this year's championship followed exactly that script.

The next problem is clock management. The common habit in the playing hall is to spend heavily on the opening, where everyone believes precision matters most, then play twenty decisive moves in twelve minutes. That distribution reverses the value of each move. A high number of moves is not a sign of strength; it is usually a sign of prolongation. A 60-move game says nothing about the quality of thought if the last 30 moves are shuffles without purpose.

The blind spot sits somewhere else

The familiar explanation at review meetings always circles around money: too little funding, too few international events, too few foreign experts. Those reasons are true, and they need to be said. They also serve as a shield covering the easiest part to fix, the part within reach of every domestic player and coach: how time is allocated and how endgames are handled.

Spending forty minutes on move eight of the opening and then playing move 38 in thirty seconds is a technical decision. No budget changes it, and no budget is needed to correct it. It takes a clock, a notebook, and someone willing to stay behind after the game.

A further blind spot sits at the level of conversation. Nobody invited the women players to the technical analysis table, even when they were present at the event and producing results. Among the games I recorded, two women had the best conversion rate of winning positions in the endgame, largely because they were willing to trade into endings while the rest wanted to finish with a beautiful combination. In exchange, their opening repertoire was narrower, and they paid for it against opponents who knew their lines.

Tactics never lie; only the people reading them get it wrong. When a player loses a king-and-pawn ending, the story is not that the player lacks ability. The story is that nobody ever opened the endgame book with them.

What should happen next

If federations keep the scoresheets and bind them into ledgers for ten years, the next generation of chess writers will hold something we do not have today: a measuring stick. With a measuring stick, what is now called a lack of talent will be called by its proper name, a lack of technique, and every lament about funding will have to stand beside concrete figures rather than stand alone.

Sometimes, to understand a game, you have to stand in silence longer than other people are willing to bear.