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Hello Spinnenmonat and welcome!
I have just finished reading Chess and I need more time to think about it, I am sure. However, my initial thought in response to your question is that Stefan Zweig gave us the background of the chess champion so that we understood that he was really like a machine - a human version of the computer called Deep Thought (I think?) that was programmed to beat a chess champion.
So the contrast was between his ability which was mechanical and without passion, and the sensitive man who was saved and then almost destroyed by chess. At first the champion's story seemed interesting, but it was as dull as he was when compared to the intensity of Dr B's story of suffering and survival.
I want to think about the book some more and will be interested to hear what others think. Is the champion representing the triumph (at the time the book was written) of Nazism and exposing its "banality of evil" as Hannah Arendt so perceptively described it?
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