Counterpoint: I (indeed, an expert) am interested in this article and I may not have seen the game until my New in Chess arrives, because I've been too lazy to keep up closely with the championship. I appreciate seeing it here immediately, just because it's nice to be timely without having to put a chess website on my RSS reader. As I mentioned, I think a club player with an interest in the chess world would find it engaging, even if they "couldn't tell the difference" between it and another grandmaster game.
I don't think your logic corresponds to the actual community preference when it comes to putting things on the front page. There are a huge amount of general interest articles devoted to things that everyone will see elsewhere. It's because people like having one-stop shopping for recent news and because people value the HN comment threads on news items. (I did go and spend a few minutes examining the portion of the game that they're discussing above, and I'm the better for it, I suppose.)
Look, I'm with you if think that we should only have really fascinating content that people are unlikely to find on their own, like some awesome technical Metafilter. I would love a site like that. Go make one. On the HN front page is an article about today's Senate vote on the Sanders amendment; the same "1000 true fans" article we've all seen ten times for two years; an obituary for Frank Frazetta from the NYT; assorted press releases from small companies; a repost from Reddit about Facebook FUD. (To be fair, there are some good posts, too.) So that's not what we have. We have general interest articles about all kinds of vaguely newsworthy things with OK commentary. Hell, we frequently have the very same articles posted month after month. On that scale, I think this weighs in above average.
I don't think your logic corresponds to the actual community preference when it comes to putting things on the front page. There are a huge amount of general interest articles devoted to things that everyone will see elsewhere. It's because people like having one-stop shopping for recent news and because people value the HN comment threads on news items. (I did go and spend a few minutes examining the portion of the game that they're discussing above, and I'm the better for it, I suppose.)
Look, I'm with you if think that we should only have really fascinating content that people are unlikely to find on their own, like some awesome technical Metafilter. I would love a site like that. Go make one. On the HN front page is an article about today's Senate vote on the Sanders amendment; the same "1000 true fans" article we've all seen ten times for two years; an obituary for Frank Frazetta from the NYT; assorted press releases from small companies; a repost from Reddit about Facebook FUD. (To be fair, there are some good posts, too.) So that's not what we have. We have general interest articles about all kinds of vaguely newsworthy things with OK commentary. Hell, we frequently have the very same articles posted month after month. On that scale, I think this weighs in above average.