The Chinese Ding Liren and the Russian Jan Nepomnjaschtschi are currently playing the World Chess Championship in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana. The first of a maximum of 14 games ended in a draw on Sunday.
This year there is a novelty at the World Chess Championship. Because for the first time since 1886, the reigning world champion is no longer competing to defend his title. The Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, world champion since 2013, lacks the motivation, he says himself. He finds the mode with 14 games too tedious.
“It’s about the time to think things over,” says chess youtuber Gerogios Souleidis on Deutschlandfunk. “That’s the big problem, also for Carlsen. It’s gotten boring for him. You have to imagine he’s playing so well that it’s boring for him to play a classic World Cup. He prefers to play World Cups or tournaments with a shorter one Thinking time, rapid chess or blitz chess. Things are happening all the time, mistakes happen, including him. People get angry, there are emotions. And the classic World Cup over such a long period of time is no longer a challenge for him.”
subject to politics
So it is that with Nepo and Ding Liren a Russian and a Chinese contest the World Chess Championship. Politics has played a role in chess in the past, says Souleidis. Today the topic is secondary. “Nepo, like many other Russian chess players, distanced himself from it at the beginning of the Ukraine war. Many have left the country and are now playing for other federations.”
Nepo, on the other hand, stayed in Moscow and ran a chess café there, Souleidis said. “Of course there are voices that say he shouldn’t have played. But I have the impression that there tends to be a majority saying: he qualified, he’s number two in the world, he won the Candidates Tournament, he has the right to play. Why should he be punished? For the fact that his country is at war? And there is no animosity between Russia and China anyway.”