The Planet Hollywood casino in Las Vegas is an unlikely venue for chess – a game associated with smoky Victorian gentlemen’s clubs, Viennese cafes and the sticky-floored upstairs rooms of pubs – but from today it hosts what is being billed as the richest tournament in chess history. The Millionaire Chess Tournament is the brainchild of Maurice Ashley, the first African-American grandmaster, who has set himself the task of transforming chess’s image from two old blokes with their sandwiches in plastic bags huddled over a chessboard to a poker-style world where money is king.

I met Ashley at the US chess championships in St Louis last year, a few months before his inaugural millionaire tournament, and he explained his vision. “Money means a lot in the US,” he told me. “The American mindset is very much rooted in the profit motive. There has to be money on the table. If you play for smalltime stakes in the US, nobody pays attention. They really don’t care. If chess is going to move to a big sport, getting any kind of attention, it needs more money.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maurice Ashley with his son, Jayden, in 2008. Photograph: Carolyn Cole/LA Times via Getty Images

He is providing it: the Open section in Las Vegas – which has attracted grandmasters from across the world – has a prize of $100,000; there are four other sections, organised according to playing strength, with first prizes of $30,000 or more; there are big prizes for finishing in the top 20 in each section; and there is even a prize for the best-dressed (which I assume means the wackiest) player on each playing day.

Dammit, I should be there, competing for the $30,000 in the section appropriate to my ability (middling amateur), the downside being that it costs $1,000 to enter and probably double that for travel and accommodation. Appropriately for Las Vegas, entering is a gamble.

When I met Ashley, I was suspicious of his iconoclasm. He dislikes games that end in draws (which the majority of games between grandmasters do). He reckons the prevalence of draws killed cricket in the US, and doesn’t want chess to go the same way. He also wants games played at faster time controls than is usual – no more of the seven-hour sessions beloved of purists. Surely this is changing the essence of chess, I protested “There are different essences to chess,” he countered.

Now, as his second millionaire tournament begins, I have come round to the idea. For a start, it’s not quite as unprecedented as it appears: from the first chess professionals in the 17th and 18th centuries on, money (and indeed gambling) has always played a part; it has always been a game for hustlers as well as gentlemen; the surface decorum hides a seamier, steelier reality. As with boxing, the key for world championship contenders in the early part of the 20th century was to come up with the cash to challenge the champion. Making the match was as important as playing it.

‘If chess is going to move to a big sport, getting any kind of attention, it needs more money' Maurice Ashley

Chess in the US has always been especially money-oriented. The New York chess hustlers between the wars were legendary, and even now in New York parks there will be guys – always guys – offering to take you on for a few dollars. (Beware: they are reluctant to pay if they lose.) I played in the Chicago Open last year, and even there the entry fee was $250 and the top prize in my section $5,000. Money talks in US chess; Ashley is just upping the ante.

More problematic is his preference for quicker games. As in cricket, where Twenty20 may ultimately challenge the integrity of the traditional game, much would be lost if the longer form was undermined. But if handled well, there is potentially scope for all formats.

Ashley’s dream is to get chess on TV, in poker-style programmes aimed at mass audiences. The parallel can never be exact because chess, unlike poker, has no element of chance, and the grandmaster will invariably beat the lowly amateur, so there is no point having every player competing for the same pot. But properly explained and contextualised, as on the BBC’s Master Game in the 1970s, chess can work well on TV, helping the audience to understand both the techniques and the players. If darts and snooker can draw an audience on TV, so can chess.

The alternative, according to Ashley, is the game becoming ever more marginalised, as has happened in the UK. There is a big chess tournament currently taking place on the Isle of Man – coincidentally sponsored by the PokerStars website (many chess players also play poker) – but you would never know it from mainstream news coverage. Despite a world-class field, it has been roundly ignored, apart from mentions in the tiny chess columns published by a few newspapers.

In Martin Amis’s short story Career Move, he imagines a world in which the roles of poets and screenwriters are reversed. Screenwriters write for little magazines and are paid a pittance; poets are drooled over by agents and make fat fortunes as conglomerates bid for their work. In my make-believe world, chess players and footballers have similarly swapped personas: top-level chess is played before baying crowds in stadiums – hear that roar in response to a brilliant queen sacrifice, the “ooh” as a player misses a checkmate – while Premier League football is consigned to deserted, windswept parks.

It’s going to take a while to effect that reversal, but at least Ashley is trying, and crass though the pitch of Millionaire Chess may appear on the surface,this could be chess’s last chance to regain the cultural centrality it once enjoyed.