The Chess World Championship begins on Sunday in Astana, Kazakhstan: the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi and the Chinese Ding Liren will compete for victory in a series of games, respectively second and third in the ranking of the best in the world. The first one won’t be there. Magnus Carlsen, reigning world champion, is in fact on vacation in Chamonix, Switzerland. After winning the World Cup in 2013 and after defending the title on four occasions, the last of which at the end of 2021, Carlsen had in fact decided not to appear at these World Cups, to which he would have had access by right as reigning champion.
Carlsen’s absence deprives the Chess World Cup of its best known and most followed character. It also doesn’t help that the favorite is Nepomniachtchi, a Russian, who had already been clearly beaten by Carlsen in the previous edition. While he has taken a clear stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a victory by Nepomniachtchi could become a problem for FIDE, the International Chess Federation, itself closely tied to Russia. Its president, Arkady Dvorkovich, served as Deputy Prime Minister of Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian Prime Minister and President.
The Chess World Cup is won in the best of 14 games, played “at a classic cadence”: which means that each one can last several hours. In the event of a tie at the end of the 14 matches, the last of which is scheduled for April 29, It will proceed with play-off matches played in “rapid” and “blitz” modes, i.e. increasingly faster and more dynamic, to decrease the time for reasoning and consequently increase the possibility of error. The matches will be played under the glass dome of the St. Regis Astana, a luxurious hotel opened in 2017 in the center of the Kazakh capital. The prize pool is two million euros.
With rare exceptions, the World Cup is contested by the reigning champion and the winner of the Candidates Tournament, in which eight of the best chess players in the world participate. Nepomniachtchi (often called “Nepo”) is at the World Cup because he won the Candidates Tournament played in July 2022. Ding, on the other hand, shouldn’t even have been at that tournament: he was “rescued” after the Russian Sergej Karjakin (one of the eight candidates ) had been disqualified for his positions in favor of the invasion of Ukraine.
It had been in the air for some time that Carlsen would not defend his world title. He had let it be understood several times, saying that he didn’t like the format and that there was only one opponent who could have enticed him to be there: 19-year-old Alireza Firouzja, a very talented Iranian-French chess player, who however finished sixth in the Tournament of the candidates. In addition to Carlsen – the strongest of all, considered by many to be at least as strong as Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov – Kazakhstan will therefore also lack what he considers to be his best opponent, according to many the best chess talent of the new generation. Just Kasparov spoke of the tournament that is about to begin as an “amputee event” that “it is hard to call the World Cup”.
Carlsen, however, had gone so far as to say that not even Firouzja’s presence would have convinced him to return to the World Cup, which requires months of meticulous preparation to study the style of play of a single opponent in the utmost detail. After the Carlsen Candidates Tournament had made it official the choice not to defend the title, speaking of a “lack of motivation” and saying that he had “nothing to gain”. A little earlier Kasparov had said that in his opinion Carlsen was not “tired”, but only “bored”.
Magnus Carlsen (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
Despite the premises, the challenge between Nepomniachtchi and Ding can also be interesting, above all for their different style of play. Nepomniachtchi is in fact often unscrupulous and aggressive, but also impatient, emotional and prone to mistakes. Ding is instead usually more patient, precise and calculating.
Nepomniachtchi, who is 32, is generally regarded as favorites as he already has World Cup experience. Ding, who is 30 years old, before the pandemic had come to be quite successful and constant: he played 100 consecutive games without ever suffering a defeat (a record later broken only by Carlsen). However, the pandemic, and the heavy Chinese restrictions, have made his last two years very complicated, effectively making it difficult for him to participate in the most important international tournaments.
Neither is particularly outgoing or media-friendly: Nepomniachtchi doesn’t care much about it, and Ding even speaks very little English. Both are far from Carlsen’s fame (and turnover) and neither has much to do with the great success of chess (which is the case for Hikaru Nakamura).
For both, a possible victory risks being told for the political implications rather than for chess merits. Despite Nepomniachtchi’s clear stance against the war in Ukraine (expressed in an open letter written by 44 chess players a few weeks after the start of the Russian invasion) and although even the president of FIDE has distanced himself from the invasion, Russia would undoubtedly like a victory in a sport that is popular for decades. And it would put even more attention on certain ambiguities: one of the main sponsors of the Chess World Cup is a bank controlled by Timur Turlov, a Russian businessman (a naturalized Kazakh) who has been subject to Western sanctions in recent months.
A win by Ding would instead bring both the men’s and women’s titles to China. The Women’s World Cup, which will take place in June, will in fact be played by two Chinese chess players: the reigning champion Ju Wenjun and the challenger Lei Tingjie. All in a country where chess was banned in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, and where it is still less popular than its “Chinese version”, xiangqi.
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