[Note: This post is also available on Substack]
Earlier this year Ding Liren became the Chess World Champion after beating Ian Nepomniachtchi in tiebreaks. If you read any news about it, you probably realised that the protagonist in that match was arguably a man who wasn’t playing in it: Magnus Carlsen, the previous world champion who decided not to defend his title.
Magnus Carlsen is still the world’s highest-rated player (ever) and is still widely regarded as the strongest chess player alive. Last summer, his shocking (though not exactly unnexpected) announcement that he would forfeit his title sent shockwaves throughout the chess world.
Why is this a big deal? – you may ask if you’re not exactly following chess news. Let’s put it this way. Carlsen is universally considered not just the strongest player alive but the strongest player of his generation (and maybe even in history), a good cut above anyone else. The World Championship tends to be seen as the pinnacle of chess achievement – to the point where Viktor Korchnoi, one of the strongest players in the 20th century, supposedly1 once claimed, at the twilight of his career, that actually he was “not good at chess” because he never managed to become World Champion. For Carlsen to just walk away from the World Championship is a bit like if Usain Bolt had decided, back when he still dominated short-distance racing, that actually he was bored of the Olympics and wouldn’t take part so he could focus on improving his world records2.
I have since been asked a few times about my opinion on this in real life, and I have been looking for an excuse to talk about chess here for a while – so I guess this is my chance!
In what follows I want to talk a little about the aura of magic around the World Championship, the reasons for Carlsen’s decision, and what consequences I3 think this will have for the world of chess in the foreseeable future.
Who is the best?
A long long time ago, there was no such thing as a chess world champion. Sure, there were some players “widely” “regarded” as the “best” in the world “in their time”, but rather than earning that status by consistently beating other would-be bests, they usually came upon this status by more subjective means: like writing influential books or becoming known for really really pretty games.
Really, for most of history, people didn’t seem overly bothered by the question of who was the best chess player in the world. For starters, the concept of a professional chess player was unthinkable to literally everyone. And besides, it’s not like players in different countries could easily travel abroad to compare themselves with foreign players.
From the 18th century, with the normalisation of the printing press, we got to a point where there was a way chess players could have an impact far beyond their geographical horizons: publish a sufficiently dazzling game, filled with mind-boggling combinations and astounding sacrifices, and players all over Europe4 would be able to marvel at your tactical prowess.
During this romantic era, the ability to win against literally every player in the world by playing dry positional chess would have earned you nothing but a reputation as a boring player. A much better strategy was to play large numbers of games, preferably against reputable players, always attacking like there was no tomorrow in the hope that one game among hundreds might be regarded as a masterpiece, worthy of awe and celebration. Sure, occasionally you might have to actually play a match against another leading player to show your dominance, but that was it – and crucially it was the pretty games that got you a seat at the (literal and proverbial) table.
In 1851, things started to change. Howard Staunton, one such unofficial World Champion5, organised the first international chess tournament in London. The winner was the German maths teacher Adolf Anderssen, who as a result became the undisputed Best Chess Player In The World.
London 1851 was a watershed for competitive chess. Never again would it be possible to just make your name through showy games and beating other impressive but not-so-solid players. The advent of chess tournaments had arrived, and from then on you would actually be required to outplay a variety of strong players, with ugly victories earning you as many points as the pretty ones. Sure, other players might disparage your style, but as long as you could beat them over the board your record would be enough to mark you as a serious contender. But now, if what you wanted was to be accepted by one and all as the best in the world, now that Anderssen had the strongest claim ever to that title, there was one thing you absolutely could not do without: beating Anderssen.
Anderssen was never actually known as a “world champion” but he may as well have been. When Anderssen was crushed by the prodigious Paul Morphy in 1856, Morphy became the undisputed “best in the world”. When Morphy abandoned chess to concentrate on an unsuccessful law career, he was still widely regarded as “the best”. Only after Morphy’s death was Wilhelm Steinitz (who’d beaten Anderssen in a match in 1866) unanimously recognised as the best.
In 1886, Johannes Zukertort thought he and not Steinitz deserved the title of “best in the world”, on account of his superior results in tournaments around this time. At the time there was no doubt of how to settle who the better player was: the two players faced each other in a match for the title of World Champion. Steinitz cemented his place in chess history by becoming the first official World Champion, and it was established that henceforth the title of World Champion would belong not to the player with the strongest tournament record, but to the player able to unseat the previous World Champion in a one-on-one match.
Since then the world of competitive chess has undergone radical changes. But through it all these two things have remained true: the World Champion is the best player in the world, and you can only become World Champion by defeating the previous champion. Well, kind of.
Chess Sedevacantism
There have previously been times when world champions were crowned without defeating the previous world champion.
The first time it happened, in 1946, was because Alexander Alekhine died (in Portugal!) while holding the title. At the time people just organised a new tournament with all the world’s best players, crowned Mikhail Botvinnik and carried on (in the process founding FIDE, which remains chess’ ruling body to this day).
The second time it happened, in 1975, was because Bobby Fischer refused6 to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov. This was a big deal, and it could have been catastrophic for the legitimacy of FIDE and the World Championship, but Fischer helpfully vanished from the face of the Earth never to play an official chess match again. Karpov thus managed to peacefully become the new World Champion, and even went on to earn himself a reputation as one of the strongest ever champions after a series of epic matches against Viktor Korchnoi and Garry Kasparov.
Because third time’s the charm, the third time it happened, in 1993, it really was catastrophic for the legitimacy of FIDE and the World Championship. At this point it was more than established that FIDE was the organiser of world chess championships. In 1992, Nigel Short had won FIDE’s Candidates tournament, making him the challenger for Kasparov’s World Championship. But then Kasparov and Short got upset with FIDE’s president and decided to create a parallel organisation (the PCA – Professional Chess Association) to organise the World Championship match themselves. Then FIDE got upset and decided to expel Kasparov and Short, then organised a World Championship match between Karpov (the previous champion) and Jan Timman (the defeated finalist of the Candidates tournament).
Between 1993 and 2006 there were two recognised world champions: PCA’s Classical World Champion and FIDE’s World Champion. Much as FIDE huffed and puffed, the overwhelming consensus was that the “real” champion was Kasparov. Not just because of chess’ long tradition of the World Championship personally “owning” his title, but also because Kasparov remained undeniably stronger than everybody else. During this time, Kasparov was barred from taking part in FIDE competitions, but all professional players were welcome in PCA ones.
Even though Kasparov lost his classical title to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000, this schism was only resolved in 2006, when Kramnik agreed to (and won) a reunification match against FIDE champion Veselin Topalov.
The 2023 World Championship is then the fourth time in history that direct World Champion succession is interrupted. Assuming Carlsen doesn’t suddenly decide to recover his title in the future, this marks the end of the Crown of the World of Chess forged by Karpov in the aftermath of Fischer’s disappearing.
Since Carlsen has no interest in the title of World Champion, no schism like 1993’s is in sight. However, there is no ignoring that for the first time in history the undisputed best player in the world isn’t even in the run for the World Championship. There is no way this can’t have consequences for the prestige and maybe even nature of the title.
Why did Carlsen give up the world title?
I fondly remember watching Magnus Carlsen become the 16th undisputed World Chess Championship, back in the innocent days of 2013. At the time, I was in the third and final year of my undergraduate degree. I remember watching the match’s livestream on my laptop (then a revolutionary technological advancement) as I studied for some tests in a tiny old students room in the University of Porto. With Carlsen being about the same age as myself, I had been aware of him for a few years and was very excited about his fateful storming of the chess world. Throughout the match, it never felt like the result was in doubt. In all games but one, Carlsen’s dominance was absolute (possibly much clearly than in any of Carlsen’s title defences). It truly felt like the ushering in of a new era for a new generation: the era of Magnus Carlsen.
I also remember one answer from the press conference after he clinched the title. Some reporter had just asked him some question about whether he thought he’d manage to hold onto the World Championship for an entire decade, like Kasparov had done – or something like it, it has been a decade. What I clearly remember is that in his reply Carlsen said something like “If in 10 years’ time I’m still the World Champion, that would be really boring”. Welp, it’s now been 10 years – and Carlsen is nothing if not bored of world chess championships. Of course, Carlsen did not give up the World Championship just because he was bored of it. But it really does come across as one major factor.
At the time, people were already starting to speak of Carlsen as a GOAT-in-waiting. As he reached his peak roughly around the same time as the Ronaldo-Messi rivalry, I always tended to think of him in opposition to the two football titans. You see, to me as a football fan whether Ronaldo or Messi was the GOAT never mattered quite as much as the fact that both of them were on top of the sport at the same time. I am certain that neither of the two was the most talented player ever, or even of their time, but their particular combination of innate talent and determination undoubtedly benefitted from the rivalry between them. Each of them was a better player because the other was there. In a way, football’s GOAT is Ronaldo vs Messi. In chess, we had something like this rivalry in the golden days of the Kasparov vs Karpov matches. Alas, Carlsen always lacked a rival7, and without a rival he seems to have lost the motivation to keep improving. At some point, Carlsen got tired of surpassing himself.
Competitive chess gives us a relatively objective quantitative measure of how strong a player is: their ELO rating. A player’s ELO rating is a number which is updated monthly to take into account all matches played by a player up to the present. If players play often enough, the difference between their ELO ratings should yield a good estimate of the probability of scoring against each other. The following plot, taken from FIDE’s own website, shows the evolution of Magnus Carlsen’s ELO rating.
Around the time Carlsen became the World Champion, in November 2013, it seemed the sky was the limit. Magnus’ rating was already comfortably above 2800 – a barrier only crossed by 14 players in history, above which Magnus has remained since he was 19, and above which no other active player is at the time of writing. At the time, there was a lot of talk of whether Magnus might actually break the (still out of reach) 2900 barrier. Even before his World Championship victory a thechessworld.com article summarised the question thus:
Pros:
a) Chess mastery and ratings tend to grow over time. Hence, rating records are likely to continue being broken in the future.
b) Magnus Carlsen is only 22. Meanwhile, while there seems to be no scientifically verified data on when chess masters usually peak, the most commonly mentioned figures are between 30 and 40. Given his rapid progress, Magnus is quite likely to earn another 28 rating points at a certain stage of his career.
c) Carlsen’s recent performances indicate that he is already capable of playing at 2900+ level. Now it’s all about consistency.
Cons:
The main problem here is the human factor. Unlike a chess engine, no human can keep maintaining a stable performance forever. Theoretically speaking, Magnus can lose motivation and/or interest in the game, or play somewhere off-form, losing a bunch of points. No one is insured against such scenarios.
Maybe the article was overly optimistic in its assessment, but to me as an observer Magnus’ evolution seemed consistent with a drop in motivation at some point after he became the World Champion. I’m hardly the world’s greatest expert on chess or Magnus, and I’m happy for more knowledgeable people to just tell me I’m plain wrong, but the feeling I got following Carlsen’s career was that at some point in the years that followed his play style morphed as his tenacity weakened. Mind you, Magnus remained comfortably ahead of the pack (that’s kind of the problem). But 2013 Magnus was known as a relentless problem-posing machine, capable of playing on in the driest of drawn positions, squeezing blood from the proverbial stone until often his opponents would make a mistake he could punish them for. People (including top players) still speak of Magnus in that way, but as far as I can tell he’s been doing less of it. These days, Magnus looks to me like a more aggressive but less solid player. It just looks to me like he was on track to keep grinding his competition to oblivion, started losing the will to suffer through those types of dry games so consistently, and rather than keep pushing for the ellusive 2900 he just adapted to find a more comfortable style that was good enough to just keep winning with less effort.
Since becoming World Champion, Magnus Carlsen defended his title four times against three different opponents. Even though he was always seemingly in control, in 2016 and 2018 the results were close enough that the outcome had to be decided in tiebreaks (series of fast games8 played to decide the winner). Then in 2021 things seemed headed in the same direction, with the first five games resulting in five “high-quality draws” between Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi. However, in game 6, Nepomniachtchi’s spirit broke. Carlsen managed to emerge victorious from what was the longest game in World Championship history, and after that Nepomniachtchi just seemed to lose focus, badly losing three of the next five games and thus the match. Soon after this match, Carlsen made it known that he felt he had nothing left to prove and was sick of defending his title. Somewhat bizarrely, he announced he would only defend his title if it were against Alireza Firouzja, the exciting youngster who’s beat Magnus’ own record for youngest person to obtain an ELO over 2800. Firouzja failed to qualify through the Candidates tournament, thereby prompting the forfeit I’m writing about.
From the first time he made it clear he was probably not going to defend his title again, Magnus stressed how World Championship matches had become kind of a chore to him.
It is important for me to say that I do intend to play chess. I will continue to play chess, it gives me a lot of joy. Already in the middle of the World Championship here in Dubai, I started to look forward to playing the World Rapid and Blitz Championship this Christmas. But the World Championship has not been so pleasurable.
(…)It’s been clear to me for most of the year that this World Championship should be the last. It doesn’t mean as much anymore as it once did.
I haven’t felt that the positive outweighs the negative.
Why such hate for the World Championship match? For starters, historically Carlsen has been critical of the format of the World Championship. On a number of occasions, he has made it clear that he would rather have something like the World Cup in football, where the defending champion competes on the same footing as everyone else. (Personally I’m against this, as however else the format can be improved it is important to me that chess remain more like boxing than like football. The previous section should make it clear why I think it is meaningful and historically important that world championships be won by defeating world champions. But hey, that is the World Champion’s publicly-held view.) So yeah, he was the World Champion but being world champion was not exactly his dream.
Moreover, preparing for a world championship is not just a lot of pressure but also a lot of work. The reigning champion and the challenger typically play a lot less competitive chess in the months leading to the match, both to avoid giving their opponents recent games to analyse and so they can fully focus on preparation. This usually involves a team of strong players and computers analysing past games and developing theoretical novelties in different chess openings (on the plus side, this opening preparation is usually still useful to players after the match is over). Magnus did not enjoy this work, and moreover he felt it was getting in the way of his actual goal of reaching 2900.
If someone other than Firouzja wins the Candidates Tournament it’s unlikely I will play the next World Championship match. Then I think I want to say that I am happy. There is so much more I can try to do. I am very motivated to get the rating to 2900.
Whither Magnus Carlsen?
So, how has this been going?
Nearly two years on, having indeed declined to defend his title, has Magnus Carlsen’s ditching of the World Championship allowed him to focus on the chess goals he is intrinsically motivated towards? At first sight, not really.
I feel like my motivation goes up and down and I am actually playing mostly for fun. I don’t have any big ambitions that I want to achieve. I have given up a bit on trying to reach 2900. It will just be very, very difficult.
(…)
I want to enjoy playing chess, but how seriously I will take each tournament will differ. Sometimes I think it doesn’t matter much.
Magnus Carlsen in May 2023
This lack of motivation, however, didn’t stop him winning the Chess World Cup for the first time in his career back in August. And, truth be told, one can argue that World Championship preparation had previously got in the way of his participation. So there is that.
But mostly, it turns out, it’s classical chess Carlen is tired of. By classical chess I mean games which take long hours and require much more precise opening preparation than faster time controls. In the same interview, he said:
Based on my experience in my last tournament in Wijk aan Zee, I feel like it’s interesting on a purely intellectual level to play classical chess. It’s nice to have time to think for a while and figure things out, but I am quite fed up with all the preparation. It’s frustrating to come up with new ideas every time in order to get a game at all. If it hadn’t been for that, classical might have been my favorite out of all tournament chess. As it is now, it’s just too frustrating.
(…)
It used to be much easier, but now it has become much more difficult because people have found more or less forced lines in most openings. Even in the London System, you need a lot of preparation to play now. It used to be a line I played in classical if I didn’t want to prepare or if nothing else worked—I thought I always had the London as a backup. Now you can’t do that anymore.
Even his status as top of the rating table, supposedly the achievement of which he was the most proud, seems to have lost its appeal:
I will definitely try to remain number one, with a decent margin. But when I play so few events, I don’t feel it’s as important. It’s not top of mind most of the time.
But if it is true that Carlsen has been stepping back from classical chess, he seems to have been investing much more time in blitz and bullet chess, the fastest time controls. In the post-pandemic world, professional chess players have found themselves playing much more online chess for money, most of it blitz and bullet. Some have even become successful chess streamers. And Magnus is nothing if not a fish in water making the rounds of the online professional chess scene. This year, he seems to be unstoppable in blitz, and only Hikaru Nakamura, another prodigy of Carlsen’s generation, has been consistently managing to best him in bullet – and even so failed to stop Carlsen from winning the chess.com Speed Chess Championship in September.
Whither the chess world?
The classical answer to the question “what is the nature of chess?” is that chess is at once Art, Science, and Sport. Different Great Champions of Yore have championed different aspects of it, and in so doing helped develop chess along all of its dimensions.
The Romantics of old were all about Art, treating games as mere means to produce masterpieces at the expense of their opponents. Kasparov, despite his artistic and competitive achievements, was a Scientist at heart, always pushing the limits of known theory. And Bobby Fischer was a Sportsman, a fanatic who dedicated his all to becoming the very best until he finally annihilated all opposition (before being consumed by his own obsession and cold-war fuelled paranoia).
Carlsen, it seems, may have started as a Sportsman, but has finally chosen Art — chess as a means of enjoyment and exploration of endless possibilities. He truly is the new incarnation of Capablanca, the Mozart of chess who dominated the 1920s with a mixture of superior technique and superior intuition — and he resents that classical chess forces him to be like Kasparov, a Scientist, ever painstakingly investigating the new theoretical frontiers. To do so requires constant effort and, after a decade of dominating world chess, Carlsen lacks the motivation to put in that effort — especially in the post-pandemic chess scene, where he can get away with focusing on blitz. To me, a lover of the slow struggle of classical chess, this is worrying as a possible sign of a shifting tide. When Kasparov walked away from FIDE, that marked an almost complete devaluing of FIDE world championships. Carlsen walking away from the concept of a world championship itself, if not from classical chess as a genre, could signal a lasting decline of the format, or force FIDE to adopt a “semi-slow” time control as the “new classical”.
I think this is likely to accelerate the modern shift from slow to fast chess events. More and more players favour online blitz over classical chess, and Carlsen’s decision is bound to ensure money keeps flowing in that direction for the foreseeable future. Then again, it’s likely this would happen even without Carlsen’s push, seeing as streaming has emerged as the most efficient way to popularise chess in the 21st century.
In any case, I think it’s fair to say that no world champion will have anything like the prestige we usually associate with world champions for at least as long as Carlsen remains the world’s highest-rated player. Ding Liren’s title is sure to sound hollow for a long time. And even after Carlsen has left the scene, it is not obvious whether the true World Champion, in terms of who is considered the best, will go back to being the winner of World Championship matches, as opposed to just the highest-rated player in the world.
Heck, there is a chance we will lose the very concept of “the best in the world”. Maybe chess will become like tennis, where ratings certainly matter but not necessarily as much as numbers of victories in “super-tournaments”. Or maybe chess will revert a little towards the Romantic past and become like Wrestling, with money and admiration going not necessarily to the most effective players but to the most entertaining ones.
The throne of chess now lies vacant, as it did following the disappearances of Morphy and Fischer. Unlike at those times, the disappeared king is still active, universally feared, and publicly shunning the old title. Unless someone steps up to forge a new crown, preferably supplanting Carlsen himself whilst he is still rated over 2800, Carlsen may have done more than destroy the Crown of Karpov — he may have have destroyed the throne of chess itself.
Footnotes
1. I have heard this told as a fact by a stronger and much more knowledgeable chess player, but my failure to Google any sources for this leads me to believe it may be just a myth. Still, myths do not exist in a vacuum, they tend to feed on preconceptions, and this one seems to me as good an example of the sort of persona Korchnoi projected as of how central the World Championship is in the mind of chess players.
2. Please let me have this analogy and pretend that not competing in the Olympics would somehow magically improve Bolt’s chances of beating his world records. This is not about the reasons behind the decision, but rather about the shock and sense of loss for fans.
3. I feel I must make it very clear that I am not an expert in the chess world. According to chess.com I’m among the 1% highest-rated players on their website, which sounds impressive but really just means I’m strong enough to be (in the amateur chess scene) a good player in an OK club or an OK player in a good club. Both before COVID and after abandoning teaching, I have consistently been among the weakest regulars in teams playing in the first divisions of a few county chess leagues in England. So what you’re getting from me is basically the perspective of one particularly romantic amateur enthusiast of the game. I mostly try to avoid making any purely chess-focused statements unless they’re seen as “accepted knowledge” by much better players than myself, but be warned of my limitations.
4. At this time, if you weren’t European you’d likely be playing a version of chess with slightly different rules. Then again, of course there were notable exceptions.
5. You may also recognise Staunton as the person after whom the modern standard style of chess pieces is named.
6. Like everything involving Fischer, this affair is rather insane. Basically at this point Fischer was highly paranoid and convinced that everyone was out to get him, especially FIDE and Russian players. Fischer seemingly attempted to use his status as the greatest chess superstar ever to convince FIDE to agree to a series of demands for the format of the world championship match. (Or, according to some people, he attempted self-sabotage by making a series of demands to get FIDE to refuse and give his pride a way out of the match.) In the end, FIDE agreed to all demands but one: the demand that the challenger need at least an advantage of 10 wins to 8 in order to win the World Championship (Fischer retaining the title in the event of a 9-9 tie).
7. Not just in the sense that nobody else has managed to match his accomplishments, though that is also true – for example, Carlsen has been number one on FIDE’s ELO rating list since 2011. But also in the sense that the rest of the world’s top-10 have never sounded (to me at least) like they seriously believed themselves to be in the same league as Carlsen. I say this based this on a number of loose comments I’ve read over the years from several top players in which they seem to at least implicitly admit their own inferiority. Yet right now I find myself unable to find most of them. Please take the following as a representative example of the sort of thing I’m referring to, which I’ve actually managed to locate:
One of the things I realized was that Magnus at some point thought about me in a way where he figured out my strengths and weaknesses. And I never really felt that before with another player, that they were actually sitting down and trying to figure out what I’m good or bad at and try to aim for those positions, but I realized that Magnus just did that diligently and understood me probably pretty well as a player. And I don’t think that I quite did the same for him, or at least not as well.
Fabiano Caruana, World Number 2 by ELO rating, about his world championship match against Carlsen in 2018.
8. The usual line goes that Carlsen is usually even more dominating in fast time controls than slow ones, so he could afford to play very cautious drawish games throughout his matches and be confident in his ability to win in a tiebreak, thereby making it his opponents’ job to take risks. The fact that the recent Ian Nepomniachtchi vs Ding Liren world championship saw players take a lot more risks, resulting in as many as seven decisive games, does support the view that the dryness of the previous matches was due to Carlsen’s dictating a cautious pace.
Aetherial Porosity 