Vietnamese Chess: One World-Class Player and a Gap Nobody Has Filled

In the Blitz section of the 2026 World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championship in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, a 22-year-old Vietnamese man sat before a board with the electronic clock counting down to seconds. Le Quang Liem won. He became world champion in the Blitz event — a first for Vietnamese chess. But if you rewind the footage of that night, you encounter another detail: apart from the clack of pieces on the board and the polite applause of the local hall, no signal suggested chess was a sport anyone back home chased after. I trust footage more than testimony, because footage does not lie. And the footage tells me a truth rarely stated: a chess nation can produce a world champion while still lacking a system thick enough to stand behind that champion. The number that identifies Le Quang Liem is Elo. At his peak he reached roughly 2740 — a zone only a few dozen players out of more than a billion who play chess worldwide have ever touched. That is a telling sign of individual talent. Yet placed beside the rating spectrum of the whole national team, the picture shifts: one very high summit, and around it a clearly lower plateau. Vietnamese chess is not a young chess nation. Since the early 2000s, Vietnamese players have regularly competed internationally and left marks at the Asian level. In the team category, Vietnam spent many years among the continent's leading group at the Chess Olympiad — the event nicknamed the Olympics of chess, gathering hundreds of national teams and thousands of players. In theory, this is a sport with a big advantage for a populous country. It does not demand costly infrastructure like football or athletics. A board, a clock, and a computer with analysis software are enough for a serious training session. The cost of introducing a child to chess is far lower than sending that child to a football academy. But that advantage only pays off with a continuous development system: from schools, clubs, and junior tournaments to the national team and long-term investment in professional players. Remove one link and the chain breaks, and talent slips out. In Vietnam, the system exists but is uneven. There are strong centers such as Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, plus a few provinces with good grassroots movements. But overall, chess remains a "self-reliant" sport for most young players: families invest their own money, take their children to tournaments, find coaches, and scramble for funding for long overseas trips. International results therefore depend heavily on outstanding individuals who rise on their own, rather than on a regular production line. This is the starting point for understanding why the story of Vietnamese chess, for many years, has been a story of lone names. When I sit down with the files of past Chess Olympiads, I usually do something simple: count how many players on each team pass a certain Elo threshold. For Vietnam, the result draws a recurring pattern. The men's lineup usually has one or two players of very high international class, while the remaining positions differ markedly in rating. In the team format, every board scores points, so a weak point on a low board can wreck a decisive match. The strength of a chess team lies not in its best player but in its weakest one on the board. Mainstream media almost never accounts for this, because it counts only medals and star names. To outsiders, the Elo rating may look like a dry number. It is in fact a probability scale: a 100-point gap between two players corresponds to roughly a 64 percent chance of victory for the higher-rated one. That means a lineup of four equally rated players is far stronger than a lineup with one star plus three average players, even if the two teams' total ratings are similar. Team chess does not add up talent; it multiplies weakness. I have spent years rewinding forgotten sports footage, and one lesson keeps repeating: people remember the scorer but forget the one who keeps the rhythm. In chess, the "rhythm-keepers" are the players on boards three and four — those who never make the front page but decide whether the team advances. Le Quang Liem is a special case. He is not only Vietnam's number one for years but one of the few Southeast Asian players to reach the threshold of the world elite. He won the World Blitz title in 2026, took many titles at international opens, and held his position across multiple competitive cycles. Of his generation is Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, another grandmaster who spent years in the national team. But the career of a top player does not depend on talent alone. It depends on playing regularly against the strongest opponents — and for a Vietnamese player, that has never been easy. Here I must talk about money. A professional player needs travel costs, accommodation, and training time uninterrupted by survival. Major international tournaments usually take place in Europe, the Americas, or the Middle East. Every trip is an investment, and that investment only returns if the player scores high enough to earn prize money. It is a loop insiders understand better than anyone: no money means no travel, no travel means no rating, no rating means no invitations. A sponsorship deal for a chess team is, in the end, not so different from a final stretched over many weeks off the pitch. It is decided by numbers, by profitability, by media image. Chess, a "silent" sport, has an inherent disadvantage: it does not produce explosive moments to sell to sponsors the way football can. A fall in the box sells tickets. A beautiful move on the board does not. That is why Vietnam's women's team, despite impressive results at Asian and world level, is mentioned even less. Players such as Pham Le Thao Nguyen and Vo Thi Kim Phung have brought Vietnamese chess notable results on the international stage, appearing in Olympiad and Asian team events. Yet their names rarely surface in mainstream sports pages. I ran hurdles all my life, only I was never timed. I use that line for myself, but it also fits many Vietnamese female chess players: they play, they win, but no one clocks those victories. There is a telling data paradox. In many countries, women's chess teams are more consistent than men's, because competition density among women is lower and some federations invest more methodically. For Vietnam, the women's team has repeatedly left its mark at Asian events and the Olympiad. But when I tried to find figures on funding, on training sessions, on the number of tournaments the women's team attends in a year, those numbers are barely published. What is not measured is rarely invested in. And what is not invested in tends to be forgotten. Every documentary is a track: the audience sees the finish, I live at every starting line. The same goes for Vietnamese chess. People see only the finish — the medal — while the starting lines — the early-morning practice, the bus ride to a junior tournament, the coaching fees — are never filmed. Someone will say: Vietnamese chess already has a world champion, so that is enough. I disagree, and I have reasons to disagree. The individual achievement of one player is not the measure of an entire chess nation. It is the result of an outstanding individual overcoming an incomplete system. If we confuse the two, we lull ourselves with a medal while the next generation of players lacks enough arenas to grow up in. The evidence lies in the numbers themselves. A healthy chess nation produces many players across many age groups, forming a continuous spectrum. In Vietnam, that spectrum has a peak but lacks a body. There are a few stars, but the gap between the star and the rest of the team, at many moments, is quite large. Of course, I must cross-check my own argument. There is a fair counterpoint: Vietnamese chess has made real progress, with more young players earning international titles in recent years, and school-chess movements developing in some cities. That is true, and I do not deny it. But progress is one thing; sustainability is another. A country may produce a few young talents through demographic luck, but only sustains its standing through a system. Looking around the region, China and India have proven the opposite of Vietnam's approach. Both built dense generations of players, one after another, and more importantly, they have enough domestic tournaments for young players to sharpen themselves continuously. In India, the wave of young players rising over the past decade is the result of an academy and tournament system invested in seriously, not of a few isolated individuals. I always ask myself a question I learned from documentary work: what is this data actually saying that runs counter to the story I want to tell? For Vietnamese chess, the answer is: the medal count speaks of the past, while the ratings of the young cohort speak of the future. And the future is not yet secured. Chess is a peculiar sport. It does not need a roaring stand to exist, but it needs a system to survive. A nation can produce a genius, but it cannot live forever on one. If you ask me what worries me most about Vietnamese chess over the next ten years, I will not name any rival. I will point to the boards lying still in classrooms, waiting for some child to sit down. And to whether, when that child sits down, anyone will be there to clock the time.