Phoenix
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So yeah, this recent tournament was held in St. Louis, the hotbed chess capital of the USA. I followed it quite closely, watching multiple matches in real time move by move, and even tuned in to the live webstream broadcast featuring live analysis and commentary (I did that for the World Championship last year as well, and also the Candidates Tournament a few months ago). I've really come to admire and respect this thing called chess. The more I get in to it, the more awed I am by the top Grand Masters. And this tournament? It had six of the top players on the planet, including World #1, #2, #3, as well as our own USA #1. Just amazing to watch these guys go at it day after day with the round robin match ups.
Then someone pointed out this "Slate" article about the whole thing. This write up is Pulitzer-consideration worthy. Just fantastic.
(I know I'm posting a lot below, but trust me, the complete article is much longer)
http://www.slate.com/articles/sport...ts_in_chess_history_just_happened.single.html
Grandmaster Clash
One of the most amazing feats in chess history just happened, and no one noticed.
By Seth Stevenson
Fabiano Caruana plays Magnus Carlsen at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup. The St. Louis tournament featured one of the strongest fields in chess history.
Photo by Lennart Ootes
Before any of the six entrants in the 2014 Sinquefield Cup had nudged a white pawn to e4, they’d already been hailed as the strongest collection of chess talent ever assembled. The tournament, held in St. Louis, featured the top three players in the game. The weakest competitor in the field was the ninth best chess player on the planet.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Gwladys Fouche/Reuters.
The favorite was current world No. 1 and reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen. The young Norwegian—who is among the best players in the history of chess—strolled into the lounge of the St. Louis Chess Club as the most alluring grandmaster ever, a brilliant, handsome 23-year-old with a modeling contract for the clothing company G-Star Raw. Forget about his overmatched foes. If anything could stop Carlsen, his fans reckoned, it would be the swirl of distractions occupying the parts of his brain not given over to memorizing Nimzo-Indian variations.
Beyond the velvet rope that cordons off three wooden chessboards and three accompanying pairs of facing armchairs, the players cut far more stylish figures. Gone are the chain-smoking Russians who dominated the chess scene of yore. Modern players work out, staying in shape to boost their energy levels and mental stamina for long matches.
The six competitors at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup: Hikaru Nakamura, Magnus Carlsen, Veselin Topalov, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
Photo by Lennart Ootes
Levon Aronian, the world No. 2, is a trim, 31-year-old Armenian in tailored clothes. Sadly, his distinctive eyewear will turn out to be more remarkable than anything he accomplishes in this tournament. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave—colloquially known, like many a Frenchman, by his three-letter monogram—is the weakest here by ranking, though, at 23 years old, MVL still has time to level up. Veselin Topalov, 38, is a former FIDE champ, but he now clings to world No. 6. The balding Bulgarian, narrow in face and lapel, is the eldest here by far and is already contemplating his inevitable fade from the top 10. He’s grown tired of the travel and the time spent away from his family. He doesn’t have the same thirst to study the game anymore, to keep up with new trends. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he told me in a quiet moment when I asked him about his retirement plans. “I’m not going to show little kids how to move the pieces around. I’ll have to think about it.”
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Anna Solvova/isifa/Getty Images.
The lone American entrant is Nakamura, a 26-year-old who often chugs Red Bull at the chessboard. Though he is ranked seventh in the world, he seems to consider himself Magnus Carlsen’s chief rival, as evidenced by this November 2013 tweet in which he equates Carlsen with a mythological necromancer.
It’s a bold pronouncement coming from a man with a record of 0–11 (plus 15 draws) against the champ. Carlsen, for his part, seems less than threatened. In an interview with a Norwegian media outlet, he once referred to Nakamura as—I believe this was correctly translated—“inept.”
Carlsen is the only active chess player in the world whom someone other than chess geeks might recognize. That’s partly due to his accolades (grandmaster at 13; simultaneous world champion of standard chess, rapid chess, and blitz chess; highest-rated player of all motherfreaking time) and partly due to some external factors (a Western not Soviet upbringing; his excellent spoken English; his Viking bone structure, fjord-colored eyes, and hay bale of hair). Carlsen is followed everywhere he goes by a small Norwegian news team captained by a beautiful blonde woman who interviews the champ on camera after every one of his matches. He’s arguably the biggest international celebrity in a 10-mile radius. Maybe 20.
Yet, by day five of the Sinquefield Cup, Carlsen was an afterthought. Something bigger was happening.
Fabiano Caruana learned to play chess at a synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At 14, he became the youngest U.S.–born grandmaster. By that point, he’d already relocated to Italy, holing up closer to Europe’s top-level coaches and tournaments. Now 22 years old—he’s nearly two years younger than Carlsen—Caruana has been steadily climbing the FIDE rankings, and entered the Sinquefield Cup as the No. 3 player in the world.
Caruana started the tournament with a win, then another. Then another. And another. And another. At the halfway mark, when each player had faced all five of his opponents exactly once, Caruana was 5–0–0. Carlsen, meanwhile, was tied with Topalov in a distant second place, recording one win, one loss, and three draws. Players get no points for a loss, a half-point for a draw, and one point for a win. Given Caruana’s 2.5-point lead, many observers believed the tournament was essentially over.
Caruana vs. Nakamura at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup.
By the time Caruana won his fifth straight game to open the tournament, destroying Nakamura while playing with black, the commentators were struggling to situate this performance in historical context. Some brought up Anatoly Karpov’s run at Linares in 1994, when he won his first six tournament games (including one against a then-babyfaced Topalov) before Garry Kasparov at last slowed him down with a draw. There was also a magical Viktor Korchnoi showing in the 1968 tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands. But many think the field in St. Louis is stronger than those Karpov and Korchnoi faced. And Caruana was still going. Were he to win all 10 games without a blemish, it would likely be considered the greatest feat in the annals of tournament chess, stretching back to the 1800s.
I asked some experts to explain, to a layman, what sort of accomplishment it would be to go on a 10–0 run here. When not reaching for analogies from other sports—one grandmaster, in complete earnestness, likened it to pitching 100 straight innings of no-hit baseball—they invariably turned to Bobby Fischer. Fischer’s streak of 20 consecutive victories against grandmasters. Fischer’s mindblowing tournament performances. Fischer’s near-hallucinatory leaps of chess logic. Stumped for further superlatives with which to describe Caruana’s excellence, one chess expert resorted to the highest possible praise: Caruana, he said, was “Fischer-esque.”
There will always be a core of diehard chess fans, but, Magnus or no Magnus, the wider interest isn’t there right now. The Sinquefield Cup—maybe the strongest chess tournament ever—drew fewer ticket buyers than an indie rock show. On a Tuesday when I was there, there seemed to be no more than 100 people in attendance. I was the only mainstream, non-chess journalist covering the event, save for the aforementioned Norwegians. The online broadcast drew about 75,000 worldwide viewers per day, which sounds respectable. Until you learn that the stream of a “League of Legends” videogame championship attracted an audience of 32 million. Televised poker, another “mindsport,” is all over cable TV and has launched a galaxy of star players. Chess has had no comparable successes.
(ha ha - I was one of those 75,000 worldwide viewers
)
Caruana won his sixth game against Topalov, and then his seventh in a rematch with MVL. He remained undefeated and undrawn. Onlookers couldn’t believe this was happening.
“He’s not making any mistakes,” said a shell-shocked MVL in a post-game interview. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen by quite some margin.”
“We’re gonna need to start calling him Fabiano Fischer,” suggested Maurice Ashley. One of the live stream commentators theorized “chess fans in the future will ask each other, ‘Where were you in September 2014?’ ”
In his eighth game, Caruana came up against Carlsen. The Norwegian played the black pieces this time, and thus was at a disadvantage. But you could sense that the champ had seen enough from his new, younger rival. Carlsen, employing an unexpected Accelerated Dragon defense, fell behind early but then managed to work a draw. Caruana’s streak of outright victories was over. “It's an amazing result,” said Carlsen in a post-match interview with Sinquefield Cup commentators. “Even if he doesn't turn up for the last two games, it would be one of the greatest of our time.”
Caruana did show up, drawing his final two games to win the tournament (and its $100,000 top prize) with a record of 7-0-3, getting 8.5 points out of a possible 10. His victory at the Sinquefield Cup earned Caruana the highest tournament performance rating of all time, crushing even Karpov’s legendary result at Linares. Earth’s finest chess players couldn’t manage to pin Caruana with a single loss. As a result, he vaulted past Aronian in the real-time rankings to become No. 2 in the world. (Carlsen finished in second place in St. Louis, three points behind Caruana, with a record of 2–1–7.) Rumor has it that U.S. chess interests are now trying to convince the U.S.-born Caruana, who now represents Italy, to compete as an American in international tournaments like the Chess Olympiad. “For the moment, I can't discuss if anything is going on,” he responded when I asked him about the possibility. “It's private.”
(PLEASE LET THIS HAPPEN!!!)
Then someone pointed out this "Slate" article about the whole thing. This write up is Pulitzer-consideration worthy. Just fantastic.
(I know I'm posting a lot below, but trust me, the complete article is much longer)
http://www.slate.com/articles/sport...ts_in_chess_history_just_happened.single.html
Grandmaster Clash
One of the most amazing feats in chess history just happened, and no one noticed.
By Seth Stevenson
Photo by Lennart Ootes
Before any of the six entrants in the 2014 Sinquefield Cup had nudged a white pawn to e4, they’d already been hailed as the strongest collection of chess talent ever assembled. The tournament, held in St. Louis, featured the top three players in the game. The weakest competitor in the field was the ninth best chess player on the planet.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Gwladys Fouche/Reuters.
The favorite was current world No. 1 and reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen. The young Norwegian—who is among the best players in the history of chess—strolled into the lounge of the St. Louis Chess Club as the most alluring grandmaster ever, a brilliant, handsome 23-year-old with a modeling contract for the clothing company G-Star Raw. Forget about his overmatched foes. If anything could stop Carlsen, his fans reckoned, it would be the swirl of distractions occupying the parts of his brain not given over to memorizing Nimzo-Indian variations.
Beyond the velvet rope that cordons off three wooden chessboards and three accompanying pairs of facing armchairs, the players cut far more stylish figures. Gone are the chain-smoking Russians who dominated the chess scene of yore. Modern players work out, staying in shape to boost their energy levels and mental stamina for long matches.
Photo by Lennart Ootes
Levon Aronian, the world No. 2, is a trim, 31-year-old Armenian in tailored clothes. Sadly, his distinctive eyewear will turn out to be more remarkable than anything he accomplishes in this tournament. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave—colloquially known, like many a Frenchman, by his three-letter monogram—is the weakest here by ranking, though, at 23 years old, MVL still has time to level up. Veselin Topalov, 38, is a former FIDE champ, but he now clings to world No. 6. The balding Bulgarian, narrow in face and lapel, is the eldest here by far and is already contemplating his inevitable fade from the top 10. He’s grown tired of the travel and the time spent away from his family. He doesn’t have the same thirst to study the game anymore, to keep up with new trends. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he told me in a quiet moment when I asked him about his retirement plans. “I’m not going to show little kids how to move the pieces around. I’ll have to think about it.”
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Anna Solvova/isifa/Getty Images.
The lone American entrant is Nakamura, a 26-year-old who often chugs Red Bull at the chessboard. Though he is ranked seventh in the world, he seems to consider himself Magnus Carlsen’s chief rival, as evidenced by this November 2013 tweet in which he equates Carlsen with a mythological necromancer.
It’s a bold pronouncement coming from a man with a record of 0–11 (plus 15 draws) against the champ. Carlsen, for his part, seems less than threatened. In an interview with a Norwegian media outlet, he once referred to Nakamura as—I believe this was correctly translated—“inept.”
Carlsen is the only active chess player in the world whom someone other than chess geeks might recognize. That’s partly due to his accolades (grandmaster at 13; simultaneous world champion of standard chess, rapid chess, and blitz chess; highest-rated player of all motherfreaking time) and partly due to some external factors (a Western not Soviet upbringing; his excellent spoken English; his Viking bone structure, fjord-colored eyes, and hay bale of hair). Carlsen is followed everywhere he goes by a small Norwegian news team captained by a beautiful blonde woman who interviews the champ on camera after every one of his matches. He’s arguably the biggest international celebrity in a 10-mile radius. Maybe 20.
Yet, by day five of the Sinquefield Cup, Carlsen was an afterthought. Something bigger was happening.
Fabiano Caruana learned to play chess at a synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At 14, he became the youngest U.S.–born grandmaster. By that point, he’d already relocated to Italy, holing up closer to Europe’s top-level coaches and tournaments. Now 22 years old—he’s nearly two years younger than Carlsen—Caruana has been steadily climbing the FIDE rankings, and entered the Sinquefield Cup as the No. 3 player in the world.
Caruana started the tournament with a win, then another. Then another. And another. And another. At the halfway mark, when each player had faced all five of his opponents exactly once, Caruana was 5–0–0. Carlsen, meanwhile, was tied with Topalov in a distant second place, recording one win, one loss, and three draws. Players get no points for a loss, a half-point for a draw, and one point for a win. Given Caruana’s 2.5-point lead, many observers believed the tournament was essentially over.
Caruana vs. Nakamura at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup.
By the time Caruana won his fifth straight game to open the tournament, destroying Nakamura while playing with black, the commentators were struggling to situate this performance in historical context. Some brought up Anatoly Karpov’s run at Linares in 1994, when he won his first six tournament games (including one against a then-babyfaced Topalov) before Garry Kasparov at last slowed him down with a draw. There was also a magical Viktor Korchnoi showing in the 1968 tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands. But many think the field in St. Louis is stronger than those Karpov and Korchnoi faced. And Caruana was still going. Were he to win all 10 games without a blemish, it would likely be considered the greatest feat in the annals of tournament chess, stretching back to the 1800s.
I asked some experts to explain, to a layman, what sort of accomplishment it would be to go on a 10–0 run here. When not reaching for analogies from other sports—one grandmaster, in complete earnestness, likened it to pitching 100 straight innings of no-hit baseball—they invariably turned to Bobby Fischer. Fischer’s streak of 20 consecutive victories against grandmasters. Fischer’s mindblowing tournament performances. Fischer’s near-hallucinatory leaps of chess logic. Stumped for further superlatives with which to describe Caruana’s excellence, one chess expert resorted to the highest possible praise: Caruana, he said, was “Fischer-esque.”
There will always be a core of diehard chess fans, but, Magnus or no Magnus, the wider interest isn’t there right now. The Sinquefield Cup—maybe the strongest chess tournament ever—drew fewer ticket buyers than an indie rock show. On a Tuesday when I was there, there seemed to be no more than 100 people in attendance. I was the only mainstream, non-chess journalist covering the event, save for the aforementioned Norwegians. The online broadcast drew about 75,000 worldwide viewers per day, which sounds respectable. Until you learn that the stream of a “League of Legends” videogame championship attracted an audience of 32 million. Televised poker, another “mindsport,” is all over cable TV and has launched a galaxy of star players. Chess has had no comparable successes.
(ha ha - I was one of those 75,000 worldwide viewers
)Caruana won his sixth game against Topalov, and then his seventh in a rematch with MVL. He remained undefeated and undrawn. Onlookers couldn’t believe this was happening.
“He’s not making any mistakes,” said a shell-shocked MVL in a post-game interview. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen by quite some margin.”
“We’re gonna need to start calling him Fabiano Fischer,” suggested Maurice Ashley. One of the live stream commentators theorized “chess fans in the future will ask each other, ‘Where were you in September 2014?’ ”
In his eighth game, Caruana came up against Carlsen. The Norwegian played the black pieces this time, and thus was at a disadvantage. But you could sense that the champ had seen enough from his new, younger rival. Carlsen, employing an unexpected Accelerated Dragon defense, fell behind early but then managed to work a draw. Caruana’s streak of outright victories was over. “It's an amazing result,” said Carlsen in a post-match interview with Sinquefield Cup commentators. “Even if he doesn't turn up for the last two games, it would be one of the greatest of our time.”
Caruana did show up, drawing his final two games to win the tournament (and its $100,000 top prize) with a record of 7-0-3, getting 8.5 points out of a possible 10. His victory at the Sinquefield Cup earned Caruana the highest tournament performance rating of all time, crushing even Karpov’s legendary result at Linares. Earth’s finest chess players couldn’t manage to pin Caruana with a single loss. As a result, he vaulted past Aronian in the real-time rankings to become No. 2 in the world. (Carlsen finished in second place in St. Louis, three points behind Caruana, with a record of 2–1–7.) Rumor has it that U.S. chess interests are now trying to convince the U.S.-born Caruana, who now represents Italy, to compete as an American in international tournaments like the Chess Olympiad. “For the moment, I can't discuss if anything is going on,” he responded when I asked him about the possibility. “It's private.”
(PLEASE LET THIS HAPPEN!!!)
