Andrew McGettigan

Last month, eight of the world’s top chess players were isolated in Ekaterinburg, competing for the right to play a title match against the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, in Dubai in November. On 26 March, the Russian government announced that international flights would cease the next day. The organisers, who had already faced complaints over the decision to hold the tournament (one competitor had withdrawn), halted proceedings so the players could get home safely. A week later, Carlsen arranged an online tournament for eight players with $250,000 up for grabs (first prize $70,000, second place $45,000). It started on Saturday, 18 April. Nothing of this order has been tried before. Chess has been slow to capitalise on the vogue for e-sports and streaming culture, as sponsors have been put off by the possibilities for computer assistance and disconnection controversies.

The Magnus Carlsen Invitational, the first high-stakes online rapid chess tournament, was won on Sunday evening by Magnus Carlsen. The host edged home against Hikaru Nakamura with two wins to one, after clinging on for a draw in a difficult endgame in the fourth and final game. The chess was high level and technical despite the shortened time limits. Carlsen, the clear favourite, was taken to the limit by Nakamura in a tense contest. Both players relied on a hazardous defensive strategy with the black pieces, enabling white to press without much risk. Including their opening encounter in the qualifying rounds, the two traded white wins for seven consecutive games before Carlsen held on at the last.

Three years after his last title match in London, the world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is defending his crown for the fourth time in Dubai. He will turn 31 at the end of the month, on the day of the fourth of fourteen scheduled match games. He has been world number one continuously since his late teens. His challenger is Ian Nepomniachtchi, currently ranked fifth in the world. They are the same age and have been playing each other for nearly twenty years. Nepomniachtchi won twice in youth tournaments before both became grandmasters and in their thirteen classical encounters Carlsen has won only once. But the last of Nepomniachtchi’s four victories was in 2017, when Carlsen was said to have been suffering with a cold.

As Friday 3 December ticked over into Saturday morning in Dubai, Magnus Carlsen edged ahead with the sixth game of his title defence against Ian Nepomniachtchi. After five draws, Carlsen broke the deadlock by winning the longest game in World Chess Championship history: nearly eight hours of play and more than 130 moves each. The extremely high levels of play from both players in the first week of the contest promised well for the second half of the fourteen-game match. But less than a week later it was all over: Nepomniachtchi contrived to lose three of the next five games, and Carlsen was declared the champion for the fifth time on Friday 10 December.

The 44th chess Olympiad concluded in Chennai last week with Ukraine’s women edging out Georgia and Uzbekistan winning the open competition with a team fielding only one player over the age of twenty. A raft of teenagers dominated the headlines with the sixteen-year-old Indian sensation Gukesh D taking the gold medal for best performance on the top board and almost leading India’s B-team – in effect an under-21 side – to gold. He was left to rue a blunder in the penultimate round against the Uzbeki seventeen-year-old Nodirbek Abdusattorov. Gukesh was so distraught he held his head in his hands and allowed his clock to run out rather than resign. His team left with bronze, one place ahead of India A.