No One Will Take Us Seriously Unless We Do
Why Chess is a Sport and D&D Isn't
I recently got Dylan Miller, one of the top solvers in NA, a free one time session with a sports psychology coach who usually works with soccer players. During their session, the coach dropped a truth bomb that didn’t just apply to Dylan’s solves; it applied to the entire DNA of speedcubing.
He told Dylan: “You think you’ll start practicing like an elite solver once you hit elite times. But in reality, you have to practice like the elite version of yourself now if you ever want to become him.”
That is the missing link in our community. We are waiting for the “Sport” to arrive before we start acting like “Athletes.”
The Chess Standard
Let’s be honest: At its core, Chess is just moving pieces of plastic across a board. Structurally, it isn’t that much different from a casual game of Dungeons & Dragons. So why does the world treat Chess as a high intellectual pursuit and D&D as a basement hobby?
Because Chess players took themselves seriously first.
Chess has the suits. It has the grandmaster titles. It has the post match press conferences where every move is ridiculed. Because they believed what they were doing was a prestigious sport, the world eventually agreed with them. They didn’t wait for Luxury Watches to show up and sponsor; they built a house worth sponsoring.
Why I Started Doing Press Conferences
When we launched the press conferences on the SpeedcubingTV channel, some people probably thought it was overkill. “Why are we interviewing Dylan and Asher about PSL Orgeon? We aren’t the NBA.”
But that’s exactly the point.
We don’t have a room full of 50 media members yet. But if we don’t start doing the press conferences now—if we don’t force the competitors to articulate their strategy, their nerves, and their rivalries—we will never create the infrastructure that requires 50 media members.
The media and the prestige don’t show up overnight. It is something we have to cultivate and manifest.
Taking the Extra Mile
If we want the world to take us seriously, we have to stop being embarrassed by how much we care. We have to lean into the prestige. We have to treat a 3.84-second average with the same reverence the world treats a 100m sprint record.
We aren’t a hobby anymore. We are those guys. We are that sport. We just have to start acting like it.