The World Chess Championship, in Astana, Kazakhstan, began in fitting fashion: with a flutter of uncertainty. Ding Liren sat at the table, staring at a white pawn that Ian Nepomniachtchi had thrust into the center of the board. Nepomniachtchi had made his typical first move, but still Ding hesitated. He took a sip of water. He’d had nine months to think of what his opening would be. Nepomniachtchi had taken three seconds to make his first move. Ding rested his chin on 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. His mind, he would say later, after managing a wobbly draw in the first of fourteen games, was distracted. “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 would become only the seventeenth champion in nearly a hundred and fifty years. For Nepomniachtchi, the second-ranked player in the world, it was the chance to redeem himself after a horrendous showing as the challenger in the previous world championship, in 2021, when he was trounced by 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. During the three weeks of the match, Ding spoke openly about feeling immense pressure.
But what was at stake for chess? 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. It was an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that Carlsen, the undisputed best player in the world, was absent. Championships don’t always feature the top competitors, of course, in any endeavor. Star athletes get injured; people retire; luck counts some 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 had simply decided that chess was changing and that the world championship, with its sclerotic format, had not kept up. He didn’t care about the crown. And so the question became, would everyone else?
Four days later, when Game Four began, at 3 P.M. in Astana, it was 2 A.M. in Los Angeles. Carlsen, his hair pulled into a topknot, sat at a table at the Hustler Casino, playing poker. 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. They were surrounded by TikTok streamers and YouTube stars.
Interest in chess has grown exponentially in recent years, and that exploding popularity probably had more to do with what was happening in Los Angeles than in Astana. In February, 2020, the Web site Chess.com had around a million and a half daily active users. Then the pandemic gave many people hours to fill. That fall, the Netflix hit “The Queen’s Gambit” gave the game some new glamour. Offered a little momentum, chess kept attracting new players: by the end of last December, Chess.com had four and a half million daily visitors; in late January, it hit ten million. The number has kept rising from there. Lichess, an open-source site, also has had record traffic. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were recently featured playing chess in a Louis Vuitton ad; other star athletes have talked about compulsively playing chess on their phones. Chess in schools, organized and otherwise, has also boomed.
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. Chess has become a TikTok phenomenon. Hikaru Nakamura, one of the game’s top players, has nearly two million followers on Twitch. Other streaming stars, like Botez, are less accomplished over the board but no less successful in front of a camera. Levy Rozman, an International Master who streams as GothamChess, has more than three and a half million subscribers on YouTube, and nearly another million on Twitch. The Chessbrahs, perhaps the first streamers to realize the potential of chess online, almost a decade ago, have a large and devoted 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. Last year, Chess.com bought his chess entertainment and education company, Play Magnus, for nearly eighty-three million dollars.
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. But most of them are not reading up on the sixth-move sidelines of the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense. 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. What these complex rules mean is that games can easily last for five or so hours. In a rapid game, players might have fifteen or thirty minutes to complete their moves; in blitz, they have between three and ten minutes. During a bullet game, each player might have thirty seconds to complete each move. Chess.com, which offers its own Elo ratings for players, doesn’t even include classical ratings, only ratings for rapid and blitz.
Some players, including Carlsen, have advocated elevating the prestige of rapid and blitz. (Carlsen is the reigning world champion in both rapid and blitz.) The relatively new Champions Chess tour, an online event, exclusively uses 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. Players have less time to think and to calculate, and so they tend to play more intuitively, and take bigger risks. They make more mistakes, which can lead to more decisive results.
The kind of chess played at the world championship has become increasingly esoteric. 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. They would study the finer points of a pawn push, going down deep theoretical rabbit holes, studying positions, in recent years, with the assistance of supercomputers. They would painstakingly memorize countless openings, prepare surprises and perhaps even little traps, the kinds of moves that might confer a slight advantage.
It is commonly assumed that a perfectly played game will end in 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. All but two of the twelve games played in the 2016 world-championship match, between Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin, were draws. So were all twelve games in the 2018 championship match, between Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. (Carlsen won both those titles in tiebreaks, which are played with faster time controls.) 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.”
His decision meant that the top two finishers from Candidates would compete for the title. Ding, who finished second, was in. He was eminently qualified. In 2017 and 2018, he had an unbeaten streak in classical chess that lasted a hundred matches; at the time, it was the longest run in the history of top-level chess. (Carlsen later topped it.) In 2019, he became the first person to beat Carlsen in a tournament playoff, and he won the prestigious Grand Chess Tour. He is one of just fourteen players in history to cross the threshold of 2800 Elo ranking points. Nothing about this was a fluke. Chess is deterministic, not random; there are no rolls of dice, no drawing of cards.
And yet Ding got to Astana in part by being very lucky. During the pandemic, he was at home, in China, unable to leave the country for 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, the Chinese federation had to hurriedly organize more than two dozen games in the span of a month to give Ding the requisite number of games to qualify.) Ding secured second place in that tournament on the final day, by beating Nakamura.
In the first two games against Nepomniachtchi, he struggled, losing 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. Game Six went to Ding, as Nepomniachtchi played quickly and Ding launched, once again, a beautiful attack. Then Ding froze in Game Seven, unable to find one of several possible moves as the clock wound down. It was shocking, haunting theatre. Nepomniachtchi had a chance to win Game Twelve, but he let it slip away, and Ding snatched the win to level the match. After a tense, wild Game Fourteen, which featured huge momentum swings and lasted nearly seven hours, the match headed to rapid tiebreaks.
In all, six of the fourteen games ended in a win or loss instead of a draw—a rarity for classical chess. There were more mistakes, too, than there had been during recent world championships. But the moments of imperfect play led to brave fights, novel ideas, opportunities for nuance and surprise. 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.
On Sunday, in tiebreaks, they drew the first three games. The fourth game looked as though it, too, would wind down, unresolved, sending the contest into a blitz portion. Nepomniachtchi, with the white pieces, had moved his queen to put Ding’s king in check, along a diagonal. It seemed clear that Ding would move his king and allow a repetition. Fabio Caruana, who was providing commentary on the Chess.com stream, called it a draw and began to talk about the game in the past tense. The commentators briefly entertained the possibility that Ding could block the check using his rook, only to reject it. Then Ding did it.
