The Ledger of Empty Squares: The Blockchain of Bangladesh Chess That No One Ever Wrote

I walked into that chess room in Purana Paltan last December, the smell of a wet winter evening still on the lane outside. Four tables inside, two with games running, two where children were setting up pieces. An elderly arbiter leaned against the wall with a worn notebook open — a scoresheet. The columns read White, Black, Result, Norm. The first two were full of handwritten names; the result column had a scatter of letters. The last column — Norm — was almost entirely blank. I turned the final ten pages. Not a single tick in any box.

I asked him what the empty squares meant. He smiled. "It means that of everyone who played, none became a Grandmaster. And whoever doesn't, their name goes nowhere."

Since that night a sentence has circled in my head, and it now returns at the top of almost every column I write: empty seats don't make a sound. In a chess hall, what makes no sound shouts the loudest — we simply have no ears for it.

Bangladesh's chess story really begins with a date, and that date is 2026. That year Dhaka's Niaz Murshed was recognised as South Asia's first Grandmaster. A year later, in 2026, India got Viswanathan Anand — who would go on to win the world title five times and lead a generation of more than eighty Indian Grandmasters. We were ahead at the start. Today, thirty-eight years on, the tally reads: India above eighty, Bangladesh five.

I hate writing that number, because I do not think it is the truth — it is a fragment of the truth. Five Grandmasters means five people. And those who never made it, no one counts. The question is not "how many succeeded"; the question is "how many could have, and where did their names go."

I first learned to read this ledger from my grandfather. Dhaka-born, a club player near Purana Paltan, later resettled in Penang. In 2026, at sixteen, I tore the ligament in my left knee in a Malaysia Youth Cup match and began nine months of rehab. In those nine months my grandfather did not teach me to read the pitch — he taught me to read the board. "The scoreboard doesn't lie," he'd say, "but it doesn't tell everything." That sentence is now the definition of my job.

In 2026, at nineteen, sitting in a university hostel, I dug up a number about the Bangladesh Chess Federation's annual government grant — roughly eleven lakh taka. Compare that: a single franchise cricketer's bat-sponsorship deal is worth more. From that day I made myself a rule — every emotional piece must contain at least one number that would embarrass an administrator. The first line of my "Board and Bread" column was a budget figure.

In 2026 a school-chess pipeline was shut down — the Standard Chartered programme that put schoolchildren in front of boards. No institution has filled that gap since. On 5 July 2026 the country's most decorated player, fifteen-time national champion Ziaur Rahman, died of a heart attack mid-game. I wrote the field piece from outside the hall. Exactly five months later, in December, fourteen-year-old Manon Reja Neer won the National Championship undefeated.

I wrote those two events as one story, because to me they are not separate. One name was written in a death notice, the other in a headline. The fifteen years between them was an empty column.

Here is my central point. We celebrate Manon Reja Neer's win, or Niaz Murshed's national title at fifty-nine — but what we don't do is keep the ledger. Chess is a game where every move can be calculated in theory: the engine can, the rating measures it, ACPL tracks it to the decimal. Yet the country that plays chess does not hold a complete account of its own players.

When I say Bangladesh's chess is in crisis, I am not talking about money — I am talking about memory. Money can return, grants can rise, sponsors can come. But a game no one recorded never comes back.

Think about this — in late 2026 I skipped two weeks of classes to cover Dhaka's Premier Division Chess League. Police, Navy, Biman and the bank teams hire Indian Grandmasters as guest boards. I tracked eleven signings and was first to report a Kolkata-based GM joining a bank side, at a reported one and a half lakh taka. That league taught me that chess here runs not on contracts but on favours. And favours are also accountable, if you know how to look.

But no transfer record from that league is permanently written anywhere. Which team took whom for how much, which junior did what on which board — it all circulates by word of mouth and never holds on paper. What I heard sitting in a Purana Paltan tea stall with arbiters and club secretaries was the league's most reliable database. A journalist's notebook — that was the sole treasury of the teams' accounts.

That night I realised how strange my job is. I worked the phones like an agent, built a contact book, because here information does not live in systems, it lives in people. And information that lives in people leaves when the people leave.

Now imagine a blockchain. A public, immutable ledger where every norm, every rating change, every junior milestone is written forever — no one can erase it, no one can deny it. My "Pipeline Watch" column tries to do exactly that, on a small scale — a quarterly record of every Bangladeshi junior crossing 2200. Because what is not written is, in memory, non-existent.

I know someone will read this and say, "Why so much fuss over a game? The players are playing." But the game isn't the question. The question is: when a child chooses chess over cricket, what does a parent look at to decide? What does a government look at to allocate a budget? What does a sponsor look at to put money in? All three need numbers. And we don't have numbers — we have only stories, and those stories start over each time, as if nothing had ever happened.

In 2026 I saw this paradox more clearly. Locked down in a hostel, I wrote "The Loudest Silence" — on football's restart in empty stadiums and chess's parallel migration online. For three weeks I lived inside the boom of an online chess server and a COVID-era club's events, then spoke to three Dhaka-based International Masters playing blitz at 2 a.m. because the board was the only room still open. One thing became clear: online, every move is logged automatically, every rating updated automatically. At a real table — our table — no one does it.

I have watched this game for nine years, and one thing stands out: in Bangladesh, cricket's data is an industry. Someone keeps strike rates, someone logs powerplays, someone tracks injuries. Chess has not a fraction of it. Yet chess is far more measurable than cricket — there is less room to escape into "I feel", every move is recorded.

So where does the zero come from? For me the answer is this: the zero is not an accident, it is a decision. A federation that does not publish its juniors' rating list is announcing — I do not need this list, because these boys are not my priority. An empty column is never neutral. An empty column means no one sat down to write, and behind not-writing is first money, then will.

I think of July 2026. I had sent Ziaur Rahman four interview requests since 2026 and got no reply. The fifth email had to go on 6 July — as a condolence note. A fifteen-time national champion who spent his life beside the board — where is the full account of his play? How many wins, how many draws, which openings, which last game — search for these and no complete picture emerges. A man who was the spine of a nation's chess left numbers that are scattered, disordered, unpublished.

This disorder feels to me like a personal insult. Because I know each empty square is really a name whose story no one wrote.

Think of Rani Hamid. She still plays Olympiads, outlasting age itself. That is proof that talent and will were never in short supply here. But if even her record is not gathered in one place, what will a new generation learn from? A teenage girl sitting at a board faces two paths — a coaching class for engineering admission, or an unpublished, unwritten, unsponsored game. Parents are not fools; they make rational choices. The fault is not theirs, the fault is the ledger's.

Now to the part not everyone will agree with — the "next Niaz" myth.

Every time a teenager plays well, the headline reads "a new Niaz emerges." I have made myself a rule — I will never write that headline. Because it is a failure of data, not just of language. When India built eighty-plus Grandmasters, they did not look for "the next Anand" — they built a system: coaches, tournaments, funding, and most importantly a public rating ledger where a junior can see exactly where the junior beside them stands.

We have no such ledger. So every new talent is a lonely flame — it burns, then dies out on its own, because there is no one visible anywhere to stand beside.

Here an uncomfortable truth needs saying, the one we avoid by saying "chess is in crisis." We always talk about the lack of money — eleven lakh in grants, an unsponsored league, no salaries. All true. But the first deficit is not money; it is the habit of recording. Money gets spent, but a preserved ledger endures. India may be ahead in money, but India was first ahead in record-keeping — they published junior games, norms and ratings regularly.

Another thing — we think five Grandmasters is too few. But we don't even know the real number. How many touched 2400 and stopped, how many left clubs for bank jobs, how many left the country — there is no account. A country that cannot count its lost talents cannot even begin to think about making new ones. Where the ledger is blank, the future cannot be written — only the past repeats.

I also admit it is easy to blame only a federation, but responsibility is shared. We journalists are partners in that empty ledger — because at a junior event, not one of ten reporters takes the results sheet home to build a database. We write stories, without numbers. This cycle needs breaking.

The core idea of my "Board and Bread" column was to keep a number beside every emotion. Because the difference between an empty chair and a full one is paper. Bangladesh's chess does not lack full chairs today — last December Manon Reja Neer proved the talent is there. Rani Hamid still proves it. The question is not talent; the question is whether we can count these talents at all.

Imagine if we had a chess ledger like a blockchain. Every win of Manon Reja Neer would settle into a block — date, opponent, rating. Niaz Murshed's 2026 Grandmaster certificate would be immutably preserved, no one able to deny its importance. Ziaur Rahman's last game — date, time, moves — would be logged forever, and his family would at least know where his numbers are.

I know this is imagination. But the power of imagination is that it shows how simple the path is, if the will exists. And the obstacle here is not technology — online chess platforms already log every move automatically. The obstacle is decision.

A final word. I watched from the sideline until the game became a sentence I could finally edit. Bangladesh's chess today is a sentence half-written, half-blank. My job is not to fill the blank — my job is to shine a light on it.

And one thing to remember: the best columns are built like a rehab plan — small steps, honest pain, no shortcuts. Chess is the same. There is no shortcut from five Grandmasters to eighty. But unless every step is recorded, we will never know whether we are advancing or going in circles.

If someone digitalised that Purana Paltan notebook today — every norm, every name, every empty square included — then perhaps that elderly arbiter would no longer have to say, "whoever doesn't make it, their name goes nowhere." The question today is blunt: can we keep a ledger capable of writing our own players' names, or will we teach the next generation to guess by staring at empty columns?