The Board Without a Scribe

The Board Without a Scribe

In 2026, in a borrowed competition room at a primary school in Nha Trang, I sat beside a twenty-seven-year-old coach and asked him about a game. It was played in July 2026, in a hall in Thanh Hoa, between a player from Hanoi and a player from Quang Ninh, built around a pawn structure that almost nobody in Vietnam used at the time. I watched the whole four and a half hours, from the first move until both men signed a draw at move sixty-eight. The young coach listened, stayed quiet for a moment, and said something I have never forgotten: "I have never seen that game."

He had not seen it because he was lazy. He had not seen it because that game no longer exists anywhere. The pencil score sheet was handed to the organisers, placed in a cardboard box, and kept in the venue storeroom through three office relocations, two rainy-season floods, and one clearance in which it went out with the rubbish. The player quit chess years ago, works another trade, and keeps no copy. The game has never been replayed a second time.

Chess is the strangest sport in the world when it comes to record-keeping. The laws require every game to be written down move by move, and every player to write out his own thinking on ruled paper. No other sport possesses such a perfect self-documenting mechanism. And yet a whole generation of Vietnamese players has passed through and left very little behind. The poverty of Vietnamese chess records does not come from the rules; it comes from nobody ever being appointed as the scribe.

In the age of the thirty-second video, I spent three months listening to one man talk about a game from 2026. Those three months were not spent gathering facts. They were the time needed for him to believe I would not write him up as a medal or a victim.

A cardboard box in the venue storeroom

Vietnamese chess grew out of summer classes in children's palaces in the late 1970s, then spread to district clubs, secondary schools, and the open-air boards in public parks. Through the 1980s and 1990s, that movement produced thousands of players, hundreds of players of real strength, and a small group good enough to step onto the Olympiad stage. It was the foundation era: the national championship was held annually, a national rating system appeared, and provincial delegations began sending teams to compete.

But the documentation infrastructure of that period was almost nothing. No personal computers to store games. No database software. No one paid to sit down and replay each game from paper score sheets. Archiving depended entirely on some individual volunteering to do it, and when that individual was transferred, retired or died, the archive went with them.

I once tried to reconstruct the list of games played at the national championship across roughly ten years. I contacted former organisers, the sports library, a few provincial federations, and people who had worked as arbiters. Nowhere had a complete set. Some had the final standings. Some had the list of players. Very few had the games. Standings tell you who won. Games tell you why.

For comparison: the most recent edition of the ChessBase Mega Database holds more than ten million games, most of them from Europe and the Americas. Chessgames.com holds more than a million. In those two archives, the number of games by Vietnamese players before the year 2026 can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Which means a young coach in Nha Trang today can look up thousands of games from a small European open, but cannot look up a single national final from his own country thirty years ago.

Every stadium I have walked through has a hidden door, and the way in is always a person. Here, that door was inside a cardboard box.

A sport that documents itself and then loses the documents

One thing few people notice deserves to be said plainly: chess is the most transparent sport in terms of rules. No controversial incidents, no ambiguous red cards, no disallowed goals. Every move is public. Every result is determinate.

Precisely for that reason, what is lost is not the truth. What is lost is the ability to explain the truth to outsiders.

There is a parallel here with the story of referees and VAR in football, something I have followed for years. In football, the crowd in the stadium is abandoned because nobody explains the decision that has just been made. In chess, the abandonment runs the other way: everything is clear to insiders, but no mechanism carries it out to the public. The outcome is the same: the audience sits outside with nothing to hold on to.

A lost game does concrete damage to three groups of people, and the damage takes a different shape in each.

Young players lose a lesson. Chess advances by replaying old games. An opening system only lives if somebody plays it, records it, and the next generation can read it. If the record disappears, the system dies with the person who devised it, and the next generation has to reinvent it from scratch. That is the greatest waste of intelligence a sport can inflict on itself.

Coaches lose a tool. Today, most chess training in Vietnam runs on engines. Stockfish evaluates every move, produces an ACPL figure, and points out which move was a mistake. The tool is enormously powerful. But it only answers the question "how". It cannot answer the question "why".

Why did that player choose that move with four minutes left on the clock? Why did he avoid a line everyone knew was stronger? Why did he sit still for twelve minutes on move thirty? No engine can answer. Only a person can. And a person can only tell it when somebody is willing to sit and listen, at the moment they still remember.

The public loses a story. A record never grows old; it is only waiting for someone who knows how to listen. But if the record no longer exists, people do not even know there is something to listen to.

A computer answers how, not why

I have worked in sports documentary long enough to know that an exact number without context is just a dead line of text. In chess this is brutally true, because chess was born attached to numbers. Elo ratings, win percentages, ACPL, average moves per game. An entire analysis industry revolves around those numbers.

Take a concrete example. A game with an ACPL of 12 is treated as almost perfect. Another with an ACPL of 45 is treated as poor quality. But if the ACPL 45 game was played in a winning position, when the player had to win because the whole team needed the point, then the risky move that led to the error may have been the right decision for the team's strategy, even if it was technically wrong. The number is not wrong. It simply does not tell the whole story.

In my own files, I have counted roughly a hundred Vietnamese games from before 2026 for which I still hold the score sheet or a handwritten copy. That figure is my personal estimate, not official data from any federation. With those hundred games I can tell a great deal. With the thousands that are gone, I can tell nothing.

In April 2026, when every tournament in the world was suspended by the pandemic, I sat in the storeroom of my house in Nha Trang and found an old VHS tape. On it was footage of Nguyen Thi Minh Phuong, the female athlete who ran the 800 metres in 1 minute 58 seconds and who was later removed from the 2026 Olympic list because of an administrative error. The stadium was empty, yet the applause of 2026 still rang inside every old record. I called twelve retired athletes of her generation, pieced their memories together, and turned it into a film.

From that process I came to believe one thing: a sport does not lose its memory because it lacks data; it loses its memory because nobody is assigned to keep it.

We think we lack data

A common view in Vietnamese sports management holds that progress requires digitisation, big databases, and investment in technology. I agree with half of it.

The other half is where I think we are looking at the wrong problem. We do not lack data in the present. Today's games are recorded by machine, stored in the cloud, streamed online. A fifteen-year-old player in Nha Trang can open up and watch every game from an international tournament held last week. Technically speaking, that level of access was the dream of the previous generation.

The problem lies in the period before digitisation. There we are short by exactly thirty years. Those thirty years contain the entire formative era of modern Vietnamese chess, and every person who built the foundation that is inherited today. When we talk about catching up with world standards, we usually picture a road ahead. But look closely and part of the road behind has been erased.

To put it bluntly: a funding project for a major tournament attracts far more attention than paying two people to digitise old score sheets for two years. I understand why. But what attracts attention and what creates value are not always the same thing.

In 2026 I came across a clip of Nguyen Van Hai, an eighteen-year-old boy, running 400 metres in 47.80 seconds at a grassroots meeting. He was not selected for the provincial team because there was no money for training camp. I followed him for two months, filmed on a phone, and cut it into a video. It reached two hundred thousand views in a month, and a local business decided to sponsor him.

That story is usually told as a victory for social media. I tell it here as a warning. What nearly happened was an athlete abandoned because of paperwork, just as another 800-metre athlete was nearly abandoned thirty years earlier. Both times, what saved them was not data. What saved them was a person who happened to be there, and happened to stop.

The one who stays behind

What should be done? I have no complete proposal, because in forty-nine years of working in this field I have never seen a complete proposal survive long enough to matter.

But I have verified a few things through my own experience. Recording a sports story always begins with the smallest and most specific detail. In chess, that detail might be the mechanical clock on the table, the arbiter's wooden flag pole, or the score sheet with two signatures slanting in different directions. Those details exist in no database. They exist only in the heads of people who were present.

Keeping memory also does not require expensive technology. It requires a job title, a person, and a salary they can live on. Call that person a scribe or a sports archivist, it does not matter. What matters is that the title exists inside a real institution, not a project that dissolves once it is finished.

Two years ago I got back in touch with the young coach in Nha Trang. He had moved to teach in another district. I asked whether he still remembered the story I told him. He said he did. I asked whether he wanted to help me rebuild the list of lost games. He was quiet for a moment, then asked me back: "What for, uncle?"

That is the right question, and I am not sure I answered it well enough.

I know only one thing. In an age when everything can be looked up, we are letting a generation pass without asking them anything in time. One day people will be able to look up every move of a game from a qualifying round of an international event held an hour ago, but will not be able to look up the national final of their own country. That gap does not create itself. It grows every day, in silence, like weeds on a stadium nobody tends. And the last person who remembers is already sixty, seventy years old.