the International Olympic Committee, my good sir. Since 1999 chess has been legally recognized as sport, is listed on the official website.

http://www.olympic.org/chess

Not in that sense. It is exhausting since players are doing 200+ APM constantly while also being under pressure and stress to win their games.

Not in my opinion. They are a business.

There are plenty of gamers who take it upon themselves to attempt completion of their games with the lowest time or least amount of resources. Just because there is less physical exercise doesn't change the fact that there is a great deal of skill, effort, and dedication involved. Try beating Spelunky or La-Mulana with those rules: I guarantee that the vast majority of the naysayers in this thread wouldn't get far at all.

The lot of you are denigrating esports because it doesn't mesh with the traditional values of your elders. The world is changing, and you are letting yourselves fall behind.

Doesn't make it a sport. The IOC is notoriously political and that was almost certainly to make the Russians happy rather than because it's a sport. They've also rolled back on rules against professional athletes to make the Americans happy and they let that psychopath Pistorius compete despite not being qualified to do so because it looked good politically.

And let's not forget about all the doping and general cheating by the Soviets back when they were a dominant force.

Bottom line is that Chess isn't a sport, sports are supposed to at least nominally affect ones physique. You're not going to have doctors recommending that a person engage in rigorous chess in order to get their body into shape. Whereas any form of sport will do that.
I do that at work, but I wouldn't say that teaching is a sport. I really think people are trying really hard to bend the definition of sport to include every competitive activity without considering the consequences.

I like chess, I have a tremendous amount of respect for chess players. Ditto for competitive gamers, but they're clearly not sports. What's next, fantasy football being a sport?
Nobody here is denigrating gaming, we're just pointing out that it's not sport by any reasonable definition. Even the term esport is there because somehow it's not legitimate if it's not a sport.

Sort of like how anthropology or psychology aren't legitimate unless they're considered sciences. Never mind the damage it does to real sciences.

That's where I'm at on a bunch of the 'definitions' presented in the thread. The criteria from SportAccord describe aspects of my job which, while it does have a strenuous physical aspect at times, is in no way a sport. And at times it IS fun, which is also part of the point of sports and games. I get spectators: production managers breathing down my neck, wondering when I'm going to be finished. And cheering when the job is done though, sadly, no hot cheerleaders to swoon over me. I even get 'away games' - remote service visits.



I'll go back to my 'element of danger' bit as part of the definition, and I'm not including Deep Vein Thrombosis as a qualifier. ; )

In fairness, playing cards with someone who's first name is a city can be very dangerous.

I think what you were watching was Cricket.

They need to define their terms considerably more clearly. By the current definition of sports, computer gaming is probably not sport, but does it need to be? The msm dinosaurs are lumping coverage of competitive gamer's events in with sport at this stage for their own convenience. But msm journalistos are as lazy as they are stupid, as evidenced by this BBC description of League of Legends - " ... sounds like it was written by the lovechild of JRR Tolkien and C-3PO ...". Really?

As computing power continues to increase and games grow ever more complex and sophisicated, they will far outstrip "conventional sports" in both their experiential and entertainment value. Anyone looking at that BBC article will realize mainstream media is so woefully behind the curve on all this that they will soon be eclipsed by entirely new and exciting phenomena that will grow from gaming and the inventiveness, imagination and enthusiasm of real gamers thru out the world.

I think there's been a blurring of the words sports and competition in the last while. Nobody complains if you call esports a 'competition' it requires strategy, planning, practice, etc. like sports (also a competition). I think that sport used to carry with it the requirement that the activity be physical, using the human body to perform amazing feats. Those who argue that esports are physical aren't wrong. It requires speed and dexterity to accurately click, hit the right keys, etc. Those who disagree just see it as someone sitting there. It's not as physically demanding as conventional sports. Most conventional sports can be used as an exercise regime. I don't see a doctor recommending Gaming as a good exercise regime (with the exceptions of DDR, Wii, Kinect, etc games). I think that is where the problem lies. I really don't have a problem with this confusion/distinction, but I'm weird :).

I personally think any 'sport' that requires a judge to determine the winner like Figure Skating or the high dive isn't really a sport, but that's my weird definition. Yes, it's a physically demanding task that requires training, strategy, planning and dedication, but I've decided if you have to have a judge tell you who wins, it's not a sport. I'm probably going to get all kinds of complaints against this belief too, but with that I think any skill based competition with a clear winner (ie: not judges) is a sport.

You've done some pretty blatant trolling in the past, but this honestly takes the cake. You've never seen anyone do professional swimming or running? I guess you've never heard of the Olympics, unless you think that they're all just doing it as nothing more than a mere hobby, and they don't worry about it much when the Olympics aren't in session?

Good, call one of the original and most respected members of the forum a troll. This should work out just fine. XD

I rarely if ever agree with him myself but some places you just don't go.

When he says that no one does swimming or running on a professional level, it's pretty clear that he's trolling. Even if you don't like the sports- honestly, I'm in that boat, I find them very boring to watch- you can't say that people don't do them professionally.

Besides, the alternative insult their intelligence and assume that he actually doesn't know that there are people who do such sports on a professional level. But he's basically insulted every Olympic runner and swimmer out there and told them that they're not actual professionals, to say nothing of all those who don't even make it to the Olympics.

I think we have a simple misunderstanding, professionally means they get paid to do it, nothing more, nothing less. Olympians don't get paid. In fact, 99% of the athletes in the world are not professional.