I greatly enjoyed Word Wars. Certainly, part of my enjoyment came from the characters and their quirks. However, an equally strong draw came from noticing how similar tournament scrabble environments and players are to those of tournament chess. As a former tournament chess player I was wondering if anyone knew of similarly styled documentaries about the chess world.
Thanks for your time.
good question. i don't know of one but would like to see it if it existed; the only similar documentary to word wars of which i'm aware would be spellbound, about the national spelling bee.
sharecheck out game over: kasparov vs. the machine. it's alright, but not as much about chess as one would hope it would be.
shareI'd also like to see more quirky documentaries about competitions.
The closest I could find for chess (from a bit of googling) is:
Chess Kids (1996) - about the world of juvenile tournament chess
http://imdb.com/title/tt0115877/