Magnus says that playing for the world title has become tedious, but the matchplay system produces champions with longevity and we should resist the seductions of annual knockouts or chess ‘majors’

Stephen Moss

The world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi was in the end a disappointment. Once Carlsen had won the glorious sixth game, the contest was over, with poor Nepo collapsing in a heap. What an anti-climax. The great Fischer-Spassky match, the 50th anniversary of which we celebrate next year, has lived for half a century in the memory. Indeed, one might argue that it was too vivid – overshadowing most of what followed. The Carlsen-Nepo match will be lucky to last for a fortnight in chess aficionados’ collective imagination.

But the fallout has been interesting. First, the suggestion that Carlsen’s easy win and his fifth title (fourth title defence) means he is now unquestionably the Greatest of All Time (GOAT). With all due respect to Carlsen, who is of course a wonderful player, this is manifest nonsense. You simply can’t compare today’s players – in any sport – with those of the past.

In many sports – cricket, golf and tennis spring to mind – the equipment gets better, so naturally Kevin Pietersen will hit the ball harder and further than Don Bradman. That certainly doesn’t mean he is better. In other sports, football and rugby say, players are bigger, stronger, fitter. In rugby especially they are playing a game that the players who were around when I was growing up and following Wales avidly in the 1960s and 70s wouldn’t recognise. The great Gareth Edwards might struggle a bit against today’s behemoths, but then the great Gareth Edwards would also be spending six hours a day in the gym and would still be great – just in a different way.

So it is with chess players: today’s elite have computers and access to all the games played by their forebears. They stand on the shoulders of these pioneers. How on earth can you compare Carlsen with Philidor or Bourdonnais, Morphy or Steinitz, Capablanca, Alekhine or Fischer, or even with Kasparov, most of whose career was in the analogue era? You can’t: all these players were great in their own ways and their own eras.

Don’t take my word for it. I asked John Saunders, doyen of British chess journalists, what he thought, and he was emphatic that comparisons across the generations were of little value. “The GOAT concept is suspect,” he told me. “It’s not really possible to form meaningful judgments on players from different eras. The basic rules may be the same, but so much has changed – time controls, computers, communications, money, other resources. Carlsen is obviously one of the greats, with a natural gift on a par with Capablanca and Karpov. Then we have the natural attackers – Kasparov, Alekhine. And what to do with Lasker and Fischer? Botvinnik? I think those are my top eight, but I can’t choose between them.”

A top eight without Mikhail Tal – very controversial. But you get the point: all these players are great; they all brought something new and different to the chess party. Identifying a single GOAT suggests the rest are mere sheep, and that is ludicrous. Let’s celebrate them all, perhaps establishing a collective pantheon, but under no circumstances crowning a single all-time champ. That is to misunderstand the nature of sporting evolution.

More intriguing is the suggestion that this title defence might be Carlsen’s last; that he might now bow out, as Fischer did in 1975, as the undefeated champ. He gave an interview to a podcast earlier this week and shocked the chess world by saying this: “It has been clear to me for most of the year that this world championship match should be the last. It does not mean as much any more as it once did. I have not felt that the positive has outweighed the negative. I want to quit when I am at my best.”

Whether he carries through with this threat is moot, and he gave himself some wriggle room: “If someone other than Firouzja wins the Candidates Tournament, it is unlikely that I will play the next world championship match.” In other words, if Firouzja is the challenger, count him in. The whole chess world wants to see a Carlsen-Firouzja match, and much now rides on the latter’s performance in the Candidates. The world championship doesn’t seem to motivate Carlsen any longer, but a match with the young pretender does. “I have to say I was really impressed with his performance in the Grand Swiss and in the European Team Championship,” he has previously said of Firouzja, “and I would say that motivated me more than anything else.”

Carlsen is clearly bored by the world championship format, and may also feel that he could be making more money from sponsorship and on social media than from competing every two years for the world title. His principal objective now seems to be to get above 2900 Elo and, by the sound of it, he would welcome an annual tournament – perhaps featuring the world’s eight top-rated players – to determine that year’s champion.

This arrangement would be very detrimental to chess. The sport benefits by having a long-term champion that the broader public can identify with. Who now remembers all the here-today, gone-tomorrow Fide champions of the 1990s and 2000s. Fide had its own champions at a time when Kasparov broke away from the governing body’s embrace. At first, champions were decided via a match, but then a bi-annual knockout tournament crowned each new champion. Your starter for 10: name the six players who held the Fide title between 1993 and 2006 (answers at end of this blog).

A separate champ every year or two just doesn’t work. They come and go so fast, the public lose all sense of who is top dog. Obviously, the present set-up gives the champion a big advantage: challengers have to slog through the Candidates and will face a champion practised in matchplay. That was in part the undoing of Nepo: Carlsen had been through this four times before. But why shouldn’t the champion have that advantage? Having climbed the mountain he deserves it, and now some other bold Alpinist has to knock him off his perch.

That there have only been 16 official and undisputed – that is the key word – world champions is a huge plus for chess. They form a kind of apostolic succession, to use chess writer Bernard Cafferty’s lovely and very apposite term. Any chess lover worth his or her salt can name the lot. In order of course. Let’s do it aloud: Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Carlsen. The change of world champion really matters. It’s a seismic moment for chess, the changing of the guard, the ushering in of a new era, and matches to determine the title can be dramatic: not just Fischer-Spassky, but Capablanca-Alekhine, Botvinnik-Tal, Karpov-Korchnoi, Karpov-Kasparov. Chess loses that climactic moment at its peril.

A tournament once a year or once every two years – in effect the Candidates but determining the champion rather than the challenger – wouldn’t be the same. It would be exciting, but it would just create a champion for a brief time and then the process would start up again. Rinse and repeat. We would soon grow tired of this. In any case, the Candidates Tournament is already exciting enough: a great event in its own right with the job of producing a worthy challenger for the champion. It is the step beneath the summit, and both stages of the climb are momentous. Leave well alone: whatever Carlsen in his ennui thinks, the system is not broken.

Others have suggested a format, such as that in tennis and golf, where you have, say, four great annual tournaments and a range of satellite events, and those determine the world number one. But chess is not like tennis or golf. Those sports have four “majors” which have been hallowed by a century of tradition. In chess, events come and go as cities and individuals put up money and then lose interest. What would these four great chess events be? Would they be opens or invitationals? It would all be hopelessly messy.

These rival systems may have superficial attractions, but in reality they would produce a panoply of different champions and the public would lose all sense of where true greatness lies. To have a Lasker as world champion for 27 years or players such as Botvinnik, Kasparov and Carlsen dominating their eras gives the sport a flagbearer, a brand name with global recognition. That should not be given up lightly in exchange for the superficial excitement of a maelstrom of different talents competing for the title.

Admittedly the matchplay system means that some very great players never became world champion – Rubinstein, Bronstein, Korchnoi, Aronian, Shirov, Ivanchuk. With an annually crowned king, they would no doubt have been multiple champions. But even their failure to win the crown has its own drama and pathos. To share round the rewards to every “great” player would mean something was lost. Everyone must have prizes. Sorry, but life isn’t like that. When undisputed world champions are so few and getting a crack at the title so hard to come by, it makes winning the crown all the more significant. There is something magical about the golden 16, each handing on the title to the next. Truly an apostolic succession.

The method might seem perverse: people laugh now when they hear that the Wimbledon tennis championship did something similar in the late 19th and early 20th century – playing an entire tournament to produce a challenger to face the previous year’s champion, who would presumably come on court fresh as a daisy to beat a rival who had struggled through a number of tough rounds (this so-called challenge-round format was not abandoned until 1922). But somehow in chess it works. Please don’t change it just because the current champion is getting bored. Let’s hope Firouzja wins the next Candidates, Carlsen is galvanised by the prospect of facing him, and we get a world championship that sets the pulses racing and rivals 1972 for banner headlines. What a present that would be for chess.

FIDE champions 1993-2006: Karpov, Khalifman, Anand, Ponomariov, Kasimdzhanov, Topalov

Why do so many chess players resist society’s demands that they take precautions against the pandemic?

Stephen Moss

Are chess players naturally libertarian? Given that many players – often men of a certain age, sedentary, not very fit, sometimes large of stomach, with a passion for beer and fried breakfasts – are in the vulnerable group for Covid, and indeed quite a few people from the chess community in the UK have succumbed to the pandemic, you might think there would be an across-the-board (in every sense) commitment to vaccination, mask-wearing and other anti-Covid measures.

But you would be wrong. I heard from one club official that when he raised the subject of mask wearing at a committee meeting just before the return of OTB chess, he was mocked for mentioning the possibility of playing in masks. People just wanted to get back to the board as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that thousands were still being infected and hospitalised and hundreds dying every day.

The discussions on the English Chess Forum have been instructive. The respected chess arbiter – and decent player – David Sedgwick started a thread labelled “Facemask openings”. “I am looking for an opening repertoire for games where I am obliged to wear a facemask and therefore want to get the game over quickly one way or another,” he wrote. “Does anyone have any suggestions? Dubious but not hopeless gambits or counter-gambits are one obvious possibility. So are lines which more or less force the opponent to acquiesce in a draw.”

Other contributors did have suggestions, including the rude (a not uncommon phenomenon on the forum) “play your usual stuff”. But what was interesting, to me at least, was that no one seemed to question Sedgwick’s premise: that mandatory mask-wearing was an imposition that should be resisted, or at the very least mocked by playing a style of chess that would guarantee as quick a finish as possible.

There is a huge thread on the forum called “Chess life returning to normal” – it currently runs to a whopping 159 pages – and while there are some naysayers who argue that we are still gripped by a pandemic and have to tread very warily, mostly you sense a desperate desire to return to the world we knew pre-Covid – a world without restrictions, and, in the case of the libertarian chess wing, without masks or Covid passports or any of the paraphernalia of what they would see as the nanny state. People calling masks “nappies” is a sure sign of this privileging of personal freedom over public safety.

In the US last spring, this battle between the health lobby and the libertarians found a lively focus in chess. The famous Marshall Chess Club, on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, banned members who had not been vaccinated against Covid from using its historic premises and said you could only play there if you could show you had been vaccinated – if, in other words, you carried a vaccine passport.

The club’s stringent policy led to demonstrations outside the venue, a lovely townhouse bequeathed by former US chess champion Frank Marshall. The demos were organised by longstanding member Anthony Kozikowski, who considered the banning of anti-vaxxers to be authoritarian. While some of his fellow members were trying to play quietly inside the club, Kozikowski led a raucous rally against the restrictions in the street outside, and in response the Marshall revoked his membership for five years.

“I am heartbroken that I have been thrown out of this club,” the New York Post reported him as saying (shouting actually) at one of the demos he led, “but I would be thrown out of this club 10,000 more times if that’s what it takes to stop vaccine passports in this country. I will not live in a country of vaccine apartheid.” The club president, Noah Chasin, was unabashed. “Our sincere desire lies in ensuring the safety of the club for the greatest number of people,” he wrote to members, “and at this time we believe that guaranteeing an environment exclusively for vaccinated people is the most prudent way to begin the transition back to business as usual.”

It is a classic battle between liberty and those who argue that liberty can sometimes become licence. You are not free, say those who demand tight restrictions and precautions, to put the health of others at risk. Chess is uniquely a game that pits healthy 17-year-olds against vulnerable 70-year-olds, and, worse, puts them in close proximity for three hours or more. Yet chess players, who you might think would be alive to the dangers of being dead because of Covid, are often among the foremost opponents of what they see as the heavy hand of state bureaucracy.

The question is why. Chess is a game with carefully laid down rules and conventions, built up over hundred of years, so players are clearly not anarchists, even if their awful behaviour at the board can sometimes veer towards to anarchic. But chess players are also natural rebels. When I was researching my book The Rookie, I played at the Marshall Club and in Washington Square Park. Chess in New York, indeed throughout the US, is aggressive and money-oriented, with lots of trash talking. Many of the players, especially the hustlers in the squares and parks, are tough nuts who are set apart from conventional society. Chess, certainly in the US and I suspect elsewhere in the world, is the preserve of rebels and free-thinkers, contrarians and trouble-makers, who have disconnected themselves – or perhaps were already disconnected – from conventional life. They are living life on the margins, and see every action of the state as an imposition.

I would like to claim this as a profound observation which I arrived at entirely on my own, but it was really prompted by reading Arnold Denker’s amusing memoir, The Bobby Fischer I Knew, on an Amtrak train from St Louis to a tournament in Chicago. “As I mentally rummage through the years and try to capture with memory’s eye the great players of the last several decades,” wrote Denker, “I find one characteristic common to almost all of them: a bitterness about and rebelliousness against the inequitable social and economic conditions of the real world … For them, playing the royal game was a purely personal statement against social injustice.” The royal game, in other words, is actually the plebeian game: cast out of the “real” world, chess players have created their own world, an esoteric, enclosed landscape in which they have mastery.

In the memoir, Denker tells a funny story about the chess and poker hustler Jacob Bernstein, one of a rich cast of characters active on the New York chess scene from the 1920s to the 1950s, a period summoned up evocatively by Denker, a US champion who died at the age of 90 in 2005. Bernstein was at a Woodrow Wilson-for-President rally. “Mr Wilson, is it true that if you’re elected, every man will have work?” asked Bernstein. “Yes”, replied Wilson. “But Mr Wilson, I don’t want to work!” Spoken like a true chess pro, many of whom have spent their whole lives scraping a living from the 64 to avoid the rigours of more conventional labour.

Alexander Cockburn, in his 1974 book Idle Passion, made this rejection of convention explicitly political. “Chess is par excellence the pastime of a disinherited ruling class that continues to crave political domination but has seen it usurped. Just as, in psychoanalytic terms, chess is a way of sublimating oedipal conflicts, so, in social terms, it is a device for sublimating political aspirations; the empty omnipotence exercised by the player over his pieces is consolation for lost power.”

Now, it is fair to say that parts of Idle Passion are rather pretentious, and some may choose to write off Cockburn’s psychoanalytically inclined musings as twaddle. But I find that phrase “empty omnipotence” telling. Chess players are often hugely intelligent people who have decided to devote a large chunk of their lives to shuffling wooden pieces around a board. Albert Einstein berated world champion Emanuel Lasker for wasting his mathematical genius doing just this. Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree countered by insisting that chess was a game “beautiful enough to waste your life for” – a bitter-sweet conclusion if ever there was one.

Chess players have either made a conscious decision to opt out of conventional life or they feel as if society has excluded them, done them down in some way, is a hostile force from which they must protect themselves. Either way, they are marginalised and see the 64 squares as a form of protection. It is little wonder that when society fights back and demands they obey the norms of conventional living, they resist the routine restrictions they are being asked to accept. Their whole life has been lived in opposition to normality, and they are not about to start conforming now. The only norms they are interested in are GM norms.

A provocative article in Chess Magazine attempts a starkly revisionist reading of the world champion’s match against Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik in 1972. But should we take the extraordinary claim that he never intended to win the match seriously?

Stephen Moss

The latest issue of Chess Magazine contains a fascinating/diverting/ridiculous (delete according to your view of whether the arguments really stand up) article about the 1972 world championship match between Boris Spassky, the suave Russian champion, and Bobby Fischer, the abrasive American challenger. The event is of course the foundation stone of modern chess: certainly in the UK where the match, which was a global news sensation, inspired a generation of players who propelled England to No 2 chess nation in the world behind the Soviet Union.

Next year is the 50th anniversary of that unforgettable match, which has already spawned countless books, films and even a musical – Chess, by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. There will no doubt be plenty more coverage next year when we relive the match all over again. The fact that this defining event will not go away is double-edged: it’s great for the game to be in the news, but less desirable that all the general public really know about chess derives from a 50-year-old contest and a deranged chess genius who barely played after he won the title and died more than a decade ago.

But back to the article in Chess Magazine. The writer, Stewart Player, who as far as I can see does not appear to be a chess historian of any standing (apologies to Mr Player if his oeuvre has unaccountably passed me by), argues that Spassky was far from disappointed to lose. Indeed, Player goes further than that; he says “Spassky had no intention of winning the match”.

Player’s argument is that Spassky didn’t prepare properly, bent over backwards to accept Fischer’s ever more extreme demands regarding conditions – including, Player says, “agreeing to play game three in a janitor’s broom cupboard” – and was above all concerned that the match was played to a conclusion, so he got his cut of the fee. “The main thing as far as Spassky was concerned”, says Player, “was that the match went ahead and that he must not lose his erratic opponent.” He argues that Spassky was already planning to leave the Soviet Union and anticipated “lucrative return matches” once he was based abroad. Player cites in his support an incendiary quote from former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik alleging that Spassky “threw” the match, but I would like to know the provenance of this. There is no footnote giving the source or context in which Botvinnik made the alleged remark, nor is the original Russian given. It doesn’t feel quite right: do Russians even talk about “throwing” a match? Something may have been lost in translation, and we surely need to see the original text for this crucial – and perhaps rather un-Botvinnik-like – allegation.

Player suggests that Spassky had a carefully worked out game plan – just not for this match! “By proving pliable and not antagonising Fischer,” he argues, “the likelihood of future million-dollar ‘title’ matches would remain, as in subsequent interviews both Spassky and Fischer talked about rematches outside FIDE jurisdiction. And these would be in the US, with Las Vegas the most oft-quoted venue.”

So, fascinating, diverting or ridiculous? Not quite fascinating because Player’s evidence is thin and rather circumstantial. He says at one point that Spassky’s long-time coach, Igor Bondarevsky, may have split with him because Spassky told him it was his intention to grant concessions to Fischer. But not a shred of evidence is offered to back up this claim. Player is just guessing that “in an argument, in his [Spassky’s] cups”, such an admission might have been made. Sorry, that’s at least one might too many. Such bold revisionism needs something more substantial to back it up.

Since I have chosen to write about Player’s article, I suppose I am admitting that the re-reading of the match is not wholly ridiculous. Clearly, Spassky did not prepare hard enough; did offer Fischer too many concessions in terms of conditions – perhaps giving the challenger a psychological edge; did miss Bondarevsky; perhaps thought too much about money rather than focusing entirely on beating Fischer, who on the strength of their previous encounters he may have underestimated; may even already have been thinking of life outside the Soviet Union – he moved to France in 1976 and became a French citizen in 1978. But all this is far from proving Player’s central contention that Spassky “had no intention of winning the match”. Let’s then file the piece under the non-committal heading of “diverting”.

David Edmonds, co-author with John Eidinow (whose name Player misspells) of Bobby Fischer Goes to War, is not willing to be quite so charitable. He dismisses the new reading of the match out of hand, and is not best pleased that Player damns his and Eidinow’s book with faint praise, calling it “very useful on Spassky’s background … while never straying too far from the routine narrative”. “There is absolutely nothing there,” Edmonds tells me, “not a single piece of evidence. My initial reaction is to be surprised that they [Chess Magazine] have given this claim column inches. This should be making international headlines if true. What a scoop! Presumably he has a response from Spassky?” Spassky, of course, is incapacitated by a stroke, and has made no response to Player’s claims.

“The idea that the best way to maximise his future income was to lose is risible,” Edmonds argues. “Why would there be more money on offer for a rematch if he was the challenger rather than the champion? His [Spassky’s] income, following defeat, took a predictable hit. He had also seen what had happened to Taimanov after losing to Fischer. Why would he risk that?” Fischer beat Taimanov 6-0 in the Candidates quarter-final in 1971 – a humiliating reverse that the Soviet authorities believed must have had a “political explanation”, leading them to reduce Taimanov’s salary and ban him from travelling overseas.

Edmonds insists his and Eidinow’s book was far from routine. “The standard narrative until our book was that Spassky, though indeed a gentleman, was a Soviet stooge,” he tells me. “That’s how he’s presented in most of the press coverage and the books that emerge in the immediate aftermath of the match. Our interviews and Soviet documents revealed the tensions in the Soviet camp and the authorities’ dissatisfaction with him.”

Edmonds says that if the claim that Spassky “had no intention of winning the match” was true, then even now Spassky should be looking for a publisher for a tell-all memoir. “If Spassky was really so motivated by money, ” says Edmonds, “then he could sell this story, even today, for a skyscraper high pile of dosh.  It seems to me to be pretty irresponsible to make the sort of claim this article makes without a shred of evidence.”

I asked Richard Palliser, editor of Chess Magazine, about Player’s piece. He doesn’t go quite as far as his author in suggesting Spassky never intended to win, but he does believe there were psychological factors at play that could have undermined Spassky before and during the match. “My take on the piece wasn’t that Spassky threw the match,” Palliser tells me, “[but] rather that he wasn’t too unhappy to lose. [I] suspect he still fought tooth and nail in every game, but at the back of his mind was the realisation that losing would have some benefits. Surely every chess player has been there at some point?”

Perhaps the crown was weighing rather too heavily on Spassky’s head. Might he have been seeking the freedom to go back to being an ordinary chess player, rather than a standard-bearer for the Soviet system? It may be that the book we need most of all to mark the 50th anniversary of the epic encounter in Reykjavik is a comprehensive biography of Spassky, one that examines his true motivations back in 1971-72. What did he really want out of the match? How did he see the future? Did he underestimate Fischer – his preparation was indeed woeful and discounted the possibility that Fischer might play 1. d4 – or was he subconsciously willing his own destruction and that of the Soviet chess machine, perhaps even of the Soviet Union itself? So many millions of words have been devoted to Fischer. Now we need to pay some attention to his adversary in that magnificent, myth-laden match.

Boris Spassky vs Robert James Fischer

The famous 13th game of the world championship match showed each player striving to win. Spassky gave up a pawn to obtain space and mobility. Fischer used a tactic to exchange queens and reach an ending where he had a preponderance of queenside pawns and then sacrificed a bishop to march these pawns forward. Spassky stoutly defended the complex and unbalanced endgame until he had to make a crucial decision which way to check Fischer’s king. It was a 50:50 decision with four minutes to play four moves, but the path he chose allowed Fischer to break through.

World championship match, Reykjavik, Iceland, 13th game, 10 August 1972
Alekhine Defence: Modern, Alburt Variation (B04)

A talk through video by Antonio Radić (Agadmator) gives more details on the game.