Writing Chess: The Discipline of Empty Data Cells

On my screen, the first data cell was empty. The cursor blinked there for ten minutes, waiting for a name, a game, a number. Nothing came.

The document I had been handed had finished loading long before. The interface showed every heading, every section, every frame — only the content was missing. A report that looked complete until you opened it and found nothing to read. I remember sitting still in front of that screen for a long while, and remembering an afternoon in 2026 at Hoa Xuan stadium, when I mispronounced the opposing team's number nine three times in a row into a microphone.

That day taught me something that is still true almost a decade later: the most dangerous thing in this profession is not being wrong, it is believing you are already right. A complete frame can convince a writer that the work is finished. My mistake in front of the microphone taught me that perfection is only a draft of sincerity.

In chess, the belief that a complete frame means a finished article costs far more than it does in football. Because chess is the sport where almost everything can be looked up.

A sport that does not permit guesswork

No discipline constrains a writer as tightly as chess. The Elo system is published by the International Chess Federation on a fixed schedule, with a publication date and a reference number. Live rating trackers update after every game while a tournament is still running. Every game at a major event is recorded in move notation and loaded into databases, where anyone can check how often an opening variation has appeared in a matter of seconds.

Then come the technical metrics. Average centipawn loss — the mean evaluation loss per move, measured from an engine's assessment — is a number anyone can recalculate. So is the share of moves matching the engine's first choice. Even the thinking time allocated to each move is recorded and published at many events.

Which means: if I get it wrong, someone will find out. If I invent it, someone will trace it. That is good for readers. But it also creates a subtler trap: when data is abundant, a writer easily comes to believe that the presence of data equals the presence of understanding.

I have followed the Vietnamese chess scene since 2026, when I was both playing tournaments and helping to organise them. In those years, most domestic chess coverage was plain match reporting: who beat whom, what the score was, who took the title. Gradually, as Vietnamese players such as Le Quang Liem and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son appeared more regularly on the international stage, the demands on writers changed.

Readers began asking questions nobody had asked a decade earlier. What opening was played in this game. Why did the player spend so much time on move twenty. How does rapid Elo differ from blitz Elo, and from classical. What do online results actually tell us about strength over the board.

These are all good questions. And they only have answers if the writer accepts a difficult discipline: stating clearly what he or she does not know.

Four questions to answer before writing a single word

When a chess story reaches my desk, the first task is not to read it but to work out what it is about. Of the four analytical objects in chess — a specific game, a player's technique, an individual's opening preparation, or the broader trend of a tournament — a writer should choose one. If you cannot identify what you are analysing, every conclusion that follows is dressed-up inference.

If the object is a single game, I need the names of both players, the event, and at least one of the following: the move number at which the evaluation swung, the time control, or frequency data for that opening variation from a database. Without these, I can still write a fine piece about emotion. But I cannot write a piece about chess.

If the object is a player's technique, I need to know where that player sits in the rating coordinate system: classical Elo, rapid Elo, blitz Elo, and whether those numbers are rising or falling over a given period. Just as importantly, I need to know whether those results were produced over the board or online. The two cannot be converted into each other. A player can be extremely strong at online blitz and entirely different when seated at a real board with hours on each clock.

If the object is opening preparation, I need to know who the opponent is. Opening preparation does not exist in a vacuum. It is an answer to a specific name, a specific habit, a specific fear. A novelty only means something once you know who it was prepared to target.

If the object is a tournament trend, I need the event tier, the format, and the event's position in the world championship cycle. A world championship match, a qualifier, an invitational round-robin, an open Swiss, a commercial online event — each operates on its own logic. Blending them together is the fastest way to produce a piece that sounds highly expert while saying nothing at all.

I once read a very long analysis of a tournament in which the author used three concepts from three different event types to draw a conclusion about a player. The prose was smooth. The argument looked tight. But when I checked the tournament format, I found that the opening variation most frequently cited in the piece had never appeared at that event at all. Nobody responded. The article was still shared.

An empty cell must be recorded as an empty cell

This is what I learned after mispronouncing a player's name in 2026, and it became a hard rule when I moved fully into writing about chess.

That day, I spent an entire month reviewing tournament footage to transcribe the names of nearly two hundred players correctly. But the bigger lesson lay elsewhere. I realised I had been carrying a bad habit all along: filling gaps with guesswork. When unsure of a name, I improvised. When unsure of a figure, I hedged. When unsure of events, I described emotions. Listeners did not catch it immediately, but they caught it later. And credibility, once lost, is lost for good.

With chess, I force myself to do the opposite. If a data table is empty, I write that it is empty. If I cannot find the publication date of an Elo list, I do not guess. If a metric has no traceable source, I mark it as pending verification rather than inserting it into the piece as established fact.

This sounds simple. In practice it is the hardest decision in the job, because a piece with empty cells always looks weaker than a piece stuffed with numbers. Editors want a tight piece. Readers want a solid piece. Nobody wants to read the sentence: I could not verify this.

Yet that very sentence is what keeps a writer alive in a field where any number can be traced back within three minutes. I keep two notebooks side by side: one for what has been verified, one for personal resonances. When I write, I never let the two lines blur carelessly into each other. The facts must stand first; only then is emotion permitted to speak.

The trap of the report that looks clean

There is a kind of document more dangerous than a wrong one: a document that looks already checked.

When an empty data cell is nevertheless marked as handled, the reader downstream will assume there was no problem at all. In chess this misreading is far more dangerous than in other sports, because bad information here does not stay still. It spreads. A single wrong rating figure about a player will be cited again, and cited again, until it becomes part of the community's memory.

I have watched this happen. A rating figure was misrecorded in an article years ago, and for several seasons afterwards I kept encountering it again in other pieces. Not because anyone deliberately copied it, but because it sat there, looked plausible, and nobody bothered to check. The cost of checking was a few minutes. Nobody paid it.

The worrying part is that when data is scarce, creative pressure rises. A writer does not want to file an empty piece. So the filling begins: a little speculation about psychology, a little conjecture about tactics, a little emotional description written as though the author had been present. Those sentences read very smoothly. They are also very hard to refute. And precisely because they are hard to refute, they survive the longest.

In chess there are zones where speculation causes real harm. Suspicions of engine use are one example. That is a serious accusation, capable of destroying a person's career, and in many cases the community holds only one side of the story. Federation transfers, eligibility conditions, format disputes — all are zones where a writer must absolutely avoid inference.

Silence in such cases is not cowardice. It is the professional standard. Based on my experience following matches and chess tournaments for nearly a decade, I can say that the most serious errors in sports media have never come from writing too little. They come from writing too much.

When a number passes through many hands

A metric does not travel straight from the board to the reader. It passes through several stages. The organiser records the result. The national federation compiles it. The international federation publishes it. Live trackers update it. Then comes the press, and finally the reader.

At every stage there is an opportunity for error. And at every stage, people tend to assume the previous stage already checked. This is the mechanism that makes mistakes spread fastest in sports information: nobody is accountable, because everyone thinks someone else did the work.

Before every piece I write, I open three tabs in parallel. One is the official games database. One is the Elo list published by the international federation. One is the live record of the event. Only when all three agree does that number go into the piece. If only two of the three agree, I note explicitly which source disagrees. If none of the three can be located, I remove the number — even if it would have made the piece more compelling.

This method is slow. A twelve-hundred-word piece can take an entire afternoon. But it is immune to the kind of error I fear most: the error that looks correct.

Put another way, this profession does not require a writer to know a great deal. It requires a writer to be honest about how far their knowledge actually reaches. And in chess, where every number leaves a trace, honesty is the only strategy with a long shelf life.

The blind spot of collective memory

There is a paradox here that took me years to see.

The chess community, like every other sports community, remembers through stories, not through data. We remember a player because he won one game for the ages, not because his technical metrics improved on the previous season. We remember a moment, not a table. We remember a name, not a row of figures.

Which means pieces that paper over gaps with emotion will be remembered longer than pieces that are honest about data. This is the profession's real blind spot. It is not that writers are lazy; it is that the community's memory mechanism rewards the memorable over the correct.

And in such an environment, the thing that is most undervalued is the gap.

I once wrote a great deal, and at great length, because I was afraid of silence. Then in 2026, when the pandemic forced tournaments to be played in empty stadiums, I was assigned to commentate a match after which an editor told me something I have never forgotten: you said everything correctly, but nobody heard the heart. I spent weeks afterwards asking myself where I had gone wrong.

The answer was not that I had said too little. It was that I had said too much. The empty stadium was already speaking. I only needed to stop covering it up. The microphone does not make the storyteller. It is the silence of the stands that signs its name beneath every line.

Afterwards I spent several weeks interviewing dozens of supporters online, asking which sound at the stadium they remembered most. I built a library of remembered sound: applause, sighs, rhythmic chanting. Then I realised the same thing holds for chess. An empty data cell, placed in the right spot, says more than a number stuffed in to fill space. It says the writer knows his or her limits. And in a field anyone can check within minutes, knowing your limits is the one asset that cannot be copied.

What remains after everything unverified is removed

I do not think Vietnamese chess lacks good writers. I think we lack a habit: the habit of recording what we do not yet know before presenting what we do.

Look at almost any analysis of Vietnamese players competing abroad and you will see the same pattern. An enthusiastic opening. A middle full of adjectives. An ending with a prediction. And scarcely a line specifying where the numbers came from.

Readers have the right to demand more. They have the right to know whether a figure came from the official Elo list or from a live tracking platform. They have the right to know whether a result was achieved over the board or online. They have the right to know whether the author replayed the game personally or simply read another report.

And if the answer to any of those is that I could not verify it, that is still an honest answer. It is better than a number that looks certain but has no one standing behind it.

Every time I sit in front of an empty data table, I ask myself: if readers could see both of my notebooks — the one for verified facts and the one for personal resonances — would they trust me more. I believe they would. Sport does not promise victory; it promises only a heartbeat willing to continue. And that heartbeat, if it is to continue for long, must stand on a foundation where not a single cell has been filled in carelessly.