Crystal Palace forward Eberechi Eze has an FA Cup final to look forward to, but he has found a novel way to take his mind off things in the buildup.
Last week, he swapped his boots for bishops and romped to victory in a four-day online chess tournament, pocketing $20,000 (£15,000) in the process.
So does he glide around the board? Does he stutter his approach ahead of converting his killer checkmate move? Here, The Athletic breaks down how he did it, drawing links — and yes, some of them are distinctly tenuous — between his performance in the serene sport of chess and his dazzling, explosive style on the pitch.
Calling the chess.com PogChamps6 a proper chess tournament is a liberal use of the term.
Much like the Baller League — a six-a-side football competition featuring an eclectic mix of YouTubers, Twitch streamers and ex-professionals — PogChamps is part of chess’s broader attempt to court a younger, online audience by having 12 celebrities face off in timed matches. That effort has been wildly successful, with monthly users on chess.com surging from 5million in 2019 to more than 30million today.
But given the relatively low-calibre field, it’s fair to ask: is Eze actually any good?
The first port of call when assessing someone’s chess chops is their Elo rating, chess’s version of a ranking system. New players are initially given a rating of 800, which rises and falls with wins and losses.
By the time of the final, Eze’s rating had climbed to 1,143, the highest in the competition (only two of his opponents had a rating above 1,000).
That places Eze in the top 15 per cent of all Chess.com players, cementing him as a solidly above-average player.
FIDE, chess’s main governing body, classifies anything below 1,000 as novice. Eze’s rating would put him above beginner level but still short of club standard — think National League South, the sixth tier of the English professional game, in football terms.
Rankings are useful benchmarks of quality, but fail to capture stylistic nuances. Nottingham Forest and Manchester City are only three points apart in the Premier League, but their tactical approaches couldn’t be more different.
To understand how Eze plays, from his meticulous pawn structure to his clever forks, we need to take a peek under the wooden board and see what we uncover.
Chess may look quiet on the surface, but with more possible board positions than atoms in the universe, it is, like football, a deeply chaotic sport. Those opening few moves are a player’s one real chance to exert control before the chaos sets in.
Like tactical setups in football, openings dictate the flow of the game, and Eze has honed in on a favoured approach.
In 2023, Eze told The Athletic how Michael Olise was crucial in developing his opening theory. “It was him and my brother who nudged me to learn how to play and face them, so that’s when I started studying the game, watching YouTube videos of the best chess openings, things like that.”
“What’s wrong with this kid?” 😅😤#CPFC pic.twitter.com/PPyIVzlXS6
— Crystal Palace F.C. (@CPFC) April 7, 2023
Across PogChamps6, Eze consistently started with the King’s Indian Attack, an unorthodox but robust setup that mirrors Palace’s counterpunching style under Oliver Glasner.
While most players going first look to dominate the centre and suffocate the opposition like Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, Eze prefers to sit back, castle early to solidify the defence of his king, and build behind a deep, solid pawn structure.
It’s not unlike the setup at Palace, the FA Cup finalists, who average just 43 per cent possession this season and, according to data from Footovision, are the fourth-most compact side in the league out of possession.
Like Palace, Eze’s conservative approach should not be mistaken as passive. It is designed for explosive counter-attacks.
The King’s Indian lets him fianchetto the bishop (placing it on the board’s longest diagonal), allowing him to sweep the length of the board to devastating effect, much like his darting diagonal run from deep that set up Daniel Munoz’s winner in the 2-1 grudge match at home to Brighton & Hove Albion in April.
Eze’s system thrives against careless, lower-rated opponents who overextend their pawns and leave gaping holes in behind. And at the Chess.com PogChamps6 tournament, careless low-rated opponents were not exactly in short supply.
Chess has its own error taxonomy. Blunders are the most severe, akin to an error leading to a goal. Against experienced players, these are usually fatal. Eze’s opponents blundered on 2.6 per cent of their moves, making them the Southampton (19 errors leading to goals this season) of the 64-square game.
Eze’s own blunder rate of 1.2 per cent wouldn’t cut it in elite chess circles, but in a field that included the self-proclaimed “greatest Pokemon player of all time”, it placed him in rarefied air.
Less severe are mistakes and inaccuracies and, again, Eze comes out relatively blemish-free compared to his error-prone chess-mates.
Thankfully for Eze, most of his blunders, including a few reckless queen losses, came in the group stage where he was never in any real danger. But his sharpness increased as the tournament progressed, especially in the semi-final against his toughest opponent on paper, Stephen Nedoroscik.
Nedoroscik, the bespectacled pommel horse athlete who won bronze for Team USA at the Paris 2024 Olympics and boasts a huge online following, had a similar Elo rating to Eze heading into the competition.
In the first game, Eze recklessly launched a premature queen attack without the supporting structure to back it up, handing the advantage to Nedoroscik. But rather than punishing the mistake, the Olympian immediately blundered his rook, leaving it exposed to Eze’s knight. From there, Eze pounced and the game quickly unravelled.
Known for mastering horses of the pommel variety, Nedoroscik was undone by Eze’s chess equivalent.
Nedoroscik celebrates bronze at the Paris 2024 Olympics but could not cope with Eze (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)
The second leg was even messier.
Eze built a commanding position, squandered it, then capitalised on a late mistake, forking Nedoroscik’s queen to seal the win. “I thought I was cooked,” said a relieved Eze after the match.
The England forward’s commentary was colourful throughout the tournament. At the end of the semi-final, he punctuated his match-winning moves by singing, “Boom, boom, boom, boom, Mateta’s in the room,” a fan-favourite chant at Selhurst Park in homage to his team-mate Jean-Philippe Mateta.
In another moment, a smirking Eze declared “en passant”, the name of a rare diagonal pawn capture that often catches novices off guard.
Eze’s Palace have come from behind to win just once all season, a 2-1 home victory in December against Southampton. But in the final against streamer Sapnap, Eze once again showed his resilience under the cosh.
He took the first game on time, with his opponent running out of minutes. In the second, Eze again ceded the advantage, but ruthlessly capitalised on a costly blunder with a rapid-fire checkmate to seal the win and the tournament.
Eze was a worthy champion.
His spring-loaded, defence-first strategy consistently outclassed weaker opponents. He’s no grandmaster, and five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen would, as he did to Trent Alexander-Arnold in 17 moves, dismantle him. But for someone who came late to the game, Eze’s composure and tactical nous are impressive.
Whatever happens at Wembley next week, the Palace man won’t end the season trophyless — not after his performance in the game of kings.
(Top photos: Getty Images)