“Chess is the most violent sport,” said the Spaniard Ricardo Calvo (1943-2002), a leading figure of the 20th century. The World Cup in Astana (Kazakhstan) between Ian Niepómniashi and Liren Ding proves him right. A day after the Russian won the fifth game after losing the fourth, the Chinese won the sixth and tied the score (3-3). One has to go back to 1981 (Kárpov-Korchnói) to find another duel for the title with four wins in six rounds. The seventh is scheduled for Tuesday.
Calvo’s statement – a top-class player, historian, writer and doctor – makes sense when you know that, unlike football or many other sports, the chess player cannot relieve the enormous tension of a four or five hour game during the game. Ding and Niepómniashi are forbidden from speaking to anyone, and shouting would be highly frowned upon, even if they do it in their dressing rooms, which also have remote-controlled cameras. And it would be ridiculous to blame the arbiter for a loss, because in chess it’s almost impossible for his decisions to change a result. Whoever loses knows that the cause is his mistakes and the successes of the rival no longer exist.
“Today I played the worst game of my life,” said Niepómniashi minutes after his surrender. He obviously exaggerated badly because what happened was more like Ding putting him in a straitjacket and expertly increasing the pressure for four hours. While he left out the best defenses, he also noted that they were very difficult for a human to see and calculate, even though the computers that process millions of games per second pick them up on the fly.
This phrase reflected the mood of the Russian at that moment. EL PAÍS then asked him if there was a logical explanation for his stumble 24 hours after a win of enormous psychological importance (he won the fifth after losing the fourth), since recovering from losses was always Niepómniashi’s weakest point. After taking a deep breath, he replied: “The tension is very high. Yesterday’s surge in self-esteem may be reflected in today’s confidence.”
Niepómniashi reflects on one of his moves during the 6th game of the World ChampionshipAnna Shtourmann/FIDE
On the other hand, Ding’s psychological strength seems Herculean: depressed after the first two rounds, confident in the third, triumphant in the fourth, defeated in the fifth and crushed in the sixth. “I made sure yesterday’s defeat didn’t bother me,” he said. But the big question in the air is how to achieve that in a sport where self-esteem is a rollercoaster ride.
Especially in this specific duel. We have to go back to a very famous rivalry, that of Soviet national superhero Anatoly Kárpov against the “traitor” (dissident fugitive from the Soviet Union) Víktor Korchnói in their second duel for the throne (Meran, Italy; 1981), finding four victories in the first six games. But even this confrontation wasn’t so exciting because Kárpov won 4:2 and there weren’t three wins in a row like now.
Both asked about it, the Slav, with an enormous desire to disappear from the limelight, postponed his answer “to another day”. The Asian contributed a very interesting idea: “In general, we hardly played any openings in these six games [primeros movimientos] of the computer, with many memory movements. We got off the well-analyzed paths pretty early and that reduces the likelihood of a draw.” This answer shows that chess between people has a future, even if the best player in the world has been a machine for about twenty years. Just as no one would dream of putting a Formula 1 car in a 100 meter dash, and athletics still has millions of fans, so does chess.
More and more comments are being made in the same direction on social networks: the still world champion, the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, does not play in Astana, whose style is quite similar to that of a computer; but the fights between Niepómniashi and Ding are far more gripping to the average fan than Carlsen’s vs. Russia’s Sergei Kariakin (New York, 2016) and American’s Fabiano Caruana (London, 2018), as technical as they are largely soporific. Chess is above all a martial art, even if it has some scientific, artistic and educational means. And finally there is a duel for the title that confirms it.
Subscribe to Leontxo García’s weekly newsletter “Maravillosa jugada”.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits