The Light Auditorium in London’s Friend’s House is bathed in pink light as players from the Ganges Grandmasters and the American Gambits, led by their ‘icon’ players Viswanathan Anand and Hikaru Nakamura, emerge from a door, sporting bright and colourful jerseys, track pants and sneakers, a break from their usual business suits. A few hundred spectators, many of them Indian-origin residents of the UK, burst into loud cheers as the two teams line up under a giant, four-sided jumbotron that belongs more to a boxing arena than a chess hall, another break from tradition in a sport where the playing halls can be quieter than libraries. For a sport that generally takes itself very seriously, almost to the point of being a stickler about players’ attire during matches, this dressed-down version at the Global Chess League is an attempt to take chess into uncharted territory: packaging the sport to make it look cooler for television and streaming. “I actually enjoy playing with sneakers very much. Normally I’m slightly conservative. Many of the other players dress …