The World Chess Championship in Astana (Kazakhstan) began in a fitting manner: with a little bit of uncertainty. Ding Liren stared at the white piece that Ian Nepomniachtchi thrust in the middle of his board. Ding hesitated even though Nepomniachtchi made his usual first move. He took a drink of water. He’d had nine months to think of what his opening would be. Nepomniachtchi took only three seconds to make the first move. Ding placed his chin against his hand. His clock ticked – thirty seconds, forty. His right index finger flicked nervously. Finally, he settled a black pawn on the square opposite Nepomniachtchi’s white. He would later say that his mind was distracted after a wobbly tie in the first game of 14 games. “I’m struggling with my feelings, my emotions,” he said.
For the two players, the stakes of the match could not have been higher: the most august title in perhaps the world’s most august game. The winner of the match would be only the 17th world champion in almost a century and fifty years. Nepomniachtchi was the second-ranked world player and he had the opportunity to redeem himself from a disastrous showing in the 2021 world championship when he lost badly to Magnus Carlsen. For Ding, the third-ranked player, it was the chance to bring the first world championship to China, and fulfill the promise he’d shown ever since he stunned the chess world, at sixteen, by winning the Chinese championship before he’d even become a grand master. Ding openly admitted to feeling enormous pressure for the three weeks leading up to the match.
What was the stakes for chess then? At the start of the tournament, at least, it was unclear what, exactly, the outcome of the game’s premier tournament would signify, or how much it mattered. Carlsen’s absence was unavoidable and uncomfortable. Championships don’t always feature the top competitors, of course, in any endeavor. Star athletes are injured, people retire and luck can count some of them out. But Carlsen, the reigning world champion since 2013, had not retired from chess—in fact, he was more visibly involved in the game than ever. He simply decided that the game of chess is changing, and that its old-fashioned format has not kept pace. He didn’t care about the crown. So, the next question was: Would everyone else agree?
Four days after the Game Four, it began at 3 P.M. In Astana it was 2 A.M. in Los Angeles. Carlsen was playing poker at the Hustler Casino while his hair was tied in a topknot. Alexandra Botez, a fellow chess player—who, along with her sister, Andrea, has more than a million and a half followers on YouTube and TikTok—was also at the table. The table was surrounded by TikTok stars and YouTubers.
The interest in chess exploded in the last few years. It is likely that this explosion of popularity was more related to what was happening in Los Angeles, than it was in Astana. Chess.com’s daily users numbered around one million and a quarter in February 2020. The pandemic then gave people plenty of hours to fill. That fall, the Netflix hit “The Queen’s Gambit” gave the game some new glamour. Chess continued to attract new players with a little boost. By the end of December last year, Chess.com was attracting four and a quarter million visitors per day; by late January it had reached ten millions. The number continued to grow from there. Lichess is an open-source website that has also experienced record traffic. Lionel Messi was recently seen playing chess with Cristiano Ronaldo in a Louis Vuitton advertisement. Other star athletes have also talked about their obsession to play chess on phones. There has been a boom in chess organized or not, and it is also being played by students.
Perhaps the bigger surprise is that people aren’t merely playing the game online—they’re also watching it, talking about it, and turning it into memes. TikTok is a TikTok phenomena. Hikaru Nakamura, one of the game’s top players, has nearly two million followers on Twitch. Botez and other streaming stars are not as accomplished on the board but they are no less successful before a camera. Levy Rozman streams as GothamChess and has nearly a million Twitch subscribers. The Chessbrahs were perhaps the first streamers who realized the potential of online chess almost a decade before. They have a loyal and large following. Magnus Carlsen was already a marketable chess celebrity—the rare grand master to walk fashion runways and red carpets—and became only more recognizable and influential. Chess.com acquired Play Magnus’s chess-education and entertainment company for $83 million last year.
Many new players are approaching the game seriously—studying openings, practicing tactics, taking courses, learning about the nuances of positional play from commentators while watching top players in tournaments, and entering tournaments themselves. Most of them don’t read up on the sidelines for the Najdorf Variation. They’re also not usually playing games with the classical time controls typically used at the game’s most prestigious in-person events. Time controls vary, but, at the world championships, players are given two hours to make their first forty moves, at which point another hour is added to their clock; twenty moves later, they’re given an extra fifteen minutes, with a thirty-second-per-move increment added at move sixty-one. These complex rules can make games last up to five hours. In a rapid or blitz game, players have from three to ten minutes to finish their moves. During a “bullet game”, each player may only have 30 seconds to make each move. Chess.com, which offers its own Elo ratings for players, doesn’t even include classical ratings, only ratings for rapid and blitz.
Carlsen and others have argued for the importance of rapid play over blitz. Carlsen, the current world champion of both rapid and Blitz, is a proponent for this. Champions Chess Tour, a relatively new online event, uses only faster time controls. These games are not only easier to play and to watch—most people don’t have five hours on a Tuesday to follow a chess match—but can be more exciting, too. As players are given less time to think, they play more intuitively and risk more. They can also lead to more dramatic results by making more mistakes.
The world championship chess has become increasingly obscure. For months, two competitors—by tradition, the reigning champion and the winner of the Candidates Tournament, which features eight of the world’s best players—secret away with their “seconds,” other top players tasked with helping them prepare. In recent years, they have used supercomputers to study positions and the finer details of a pawn-push, as well as go down rabbit holes of deep theoretical analysis. They would carefully memorize openings and prepare little surprises or traps.
Most people assume that a game played perfectly will end with a draw. And, lately, the top players, who might spend thirty or forty minutes calculating possible moves in a difficult position, have been more precise—and are increasingly unwilling to risk giving their opponents an opening, especially against Carlsen. The 2016 world championship match between Carlsen, Sergey Karjakin and their opponents ended in a draw for all but two of the 12 games. All twelve games of the championship match between Carlsen & Fabiano Cauana in 2018 were also draws. Carlsen was able to win both titles through tiebreaks that are played at a faster pace. Last summer, Carlsen said on his podcast “The Magnus Effect” that he was “not motivated” to play another world-championship match. “I don’t have a lot to gain,” he said. “I don’t particularly like it.”
The top two finishers in the Candidates competition would now compete for the title. Ding was the second-place finisher. He was more than qualified. He had a 100-match unbeaten streak at classical chess between 2017 and 2018. At the time it was the longest in the history top-level chess. Carlsen surpassed it later. In 2019, he was the first person in history to defeat Carlsen during a tournament-playoff, and won the Grand Chess Tour. Only fourteen players have ever achieved 2800 Elo points. This was not a fluke. Chess, unlike other games, is deterministic and not random. No dice are rolled, and no cards are drawn.
Ding’s journey to Astana was partly due to his luck. During the pandemic he was in China and unable leave the country to play tournaments. A visa issue meant that he couldn’t play in the final qualifier for Candidates; it was only after Karjakin was suspended for speaking in favor of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that Ding, the highest-rated player who had not qualified, was included. Even then, it took the Chinese Federation a month of hasty organizing to get Ding to the required number of games. Ding won the second place at that tournament by defeating Nakamura on the final night.
He struggled in the first two games, and lost Game Two. But, in the third, he managed a quiet draw, and, in the fourth, he took advantage of a mistake to trap Nepomniachtchi’s king in a gorgeous mating net. In the fifth game, it was Nepomniachtchi’s turn to take advantage of one of Ding’s inaccuracies, as chess players call them, displaying his own excellent technique. Ding won Game Six, after Nepomniachtchi displayed a quick play and Ding again launched a stunning attack. Ding became frozen in Game Seven. Unable to find a move as the clock was ticking down, Ding could not make a decision. The scene was shocking and haunting. Nepomniachtchi could have won Game Twelve. But he let the opportunity slip, and Ding grabbed the victory to level the match. The match moved to rapid tiebreaks after a wild, tense Game Fourteen that lasted almost seven hours and featured massive momentum swings.
In all, six of the fourteen games ended in a win or loss instead of a draw—a rarity for classical chess. There were also many more mistakes made than during the recent world championships. The moments of imperfect play, however, led to courageous fights, new ideas, and opportunities for nuanced and surprising play. When Ding was asked why there had been so many decisive games, he said, “Maybe we are not professional like Magnus.” It was not really a joke. They weren’t playing it safe; there was nothing cold or impenetrable about their play. Ding talked about his emotions, and Nepomniachtchi’s body language showed his.
In tiebreaks on Sunday, the first three matches were drawn. The fourth game also looked like it would end unresolved and send the match into a blitz section. Nepomniachtchi, with the white pieces, had moved his queen to put Ding’s king in check, along a diagonal. Ding’s king was moving and it seemed that he would allow the repetition. Fabiano Caruana called the game a draw on the Chess.com live stream and started to speak about it in the past tense. Commentators entertained briefly the idea that Ding may be able to block the check by using his rook. However, they rejected the idea. Ding then did it.
