The Scoresheet Nobody Kept: Bangladesh Chess's Biggest Deficit Is Not Talent

The chess hall in Purana Paltan was already warm when I climbed the stairs at three in the afternoon last December. A tea stall below, boards on every table above, and in one corner an organiser thumbing through a spiral notebook held shut with a rubber band. He opened it for me. Pairings in pencil, results beside them: "1-0", "0.5", "1-0". One game from the 2026 national championship, finished in 48 moves. Nobody kept the scoresheet. Those 48 moves exist in no archive on earth — only a "1-0" wedged between two lines.

Had he not opened that notebook, I would probably have written another "who is the next Niaz" piece. Nine years of sitting beside boards has taught me one thing clearly: the most credible evidence of this country's chess crisis is not a lost player, it is a lost document. I watched from the sideline until the game became a sentence I could finally edit. My notebook is titled "Things the Scoreboard Cannot See", and its blank pages outnumber the full ones.

The numbers are small, and smallness can be measured. The federation's annual government grant is roughly 1.1 million taka — less than a franchise cricketer's bat sponsorship. Niaz Murshed became a grandmaster in 2026, a year before Viswanathan Anand. Bangladesh still counts five. When the school-level chess programme was shut down in 2026, the pipeline stopped producing new names.

That gap is now papered over by guest boards in the Premier Division Chess League. Covering two weeks in Dhaka in 2026, I watched Police, Navy, Biman and the bank teams hire Indian grandmasters. One bank side took a Kolkata-based GM for a reported 150,000 taka — I checked the figure by phone with two club secretaries. The transaction has a ledger. The record does not.

On 5 July 2026, the national championship was in progress. Ziaur Rahman, fifteen-time national champion, was at the board when a heart attack came and the game did not finish. One does not interrogate grief; the question arrives afterwards — where is the scoresheet from the board he sat at last? In December 2026, fourteen-year-old Manon Reja Neer won the national title undefeated. I wrote both stories as one, because they are two sides of the same empty square.

Make a list of what fills that square and it gets uncomfortable. Twenty years of national championship games are unarchived; league results surface as photographs on Facebook rather than PGN files; no one can say which junior sat across which international master, with a clock running, on which date. The federation's grant is not published annually either — I have spent three years stitching it together from files.

The resulting picture is drearily rational. A parent deciding where to invest a childhood sees a notebook, some photographs, a few social posts. Where cricket offers a visible ten-year career staircase built on state money, chess offers uncertainty. So the child goes to engineering, and I find it hard to blame anyone.

This information gap is not benign. Without records, sponsors will not pay; without sponsors, nobody is employed to keep records — and that loop turns in office files, not on the board. My quarterly Pipeline Watch keeps finding that the number of Bangladeshi juniors crossing 2200 can be counted on one hand. The count is small; the apparatus for proving the count is smaller.

Hold one comparison. Digitising old national championship scoresheets, converting league games to PGN, and paying one archivist costs less than sending a single player to one foreign tournament. We send players every year because sending a player is news, and hiring an archivist is not.

Here is my least comfortable observation. Everyone condemns the league for hiring foreign grandmasters, arguing it takes boards away from locals. Those five or six rounds are something else: they are almost the only moments each year when a Bangladeshi junior sits opposite a 2500-plus opponent with the clock running. And not one move from those games is written down.

So the loss is not the board handed away. The loss is what happens after the hall empties. Five days of learning evaporates in five days because it was never bound into a file. Had those games been recorded, coaches would learn how a local junior holds twenty moves against 2500 — and that knowledge would be the cheapest training available.

I understand the appeal of dreaming about a sixth grandmaster. But on what evidence would he arrive? If no single place records where each junior stands, who identifies talent — an organiser's memory, or a tea-stall rumour? Grammar comes before poetry. The best columns are built like a rehab plan: small steps, honest pain, no shortcuts.

Before he closed the notebook, the organiser said: "Sir, we remember all the results anyway." Yes — today you do. Staking a sport's future on who remembers in ten years is not a plan. When the hall lights go off, the notebook goes back under its rubber band, and that one "1-0" will tell nobody anything next year either.