The Psychological Drama of the World Chess Championship

Louisa Thomas

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For nearly eight hours, they probed, maneuvered, thrust, and parried. Throughout the sixth game of the World Chess Championship, Magnus Carlsen, the four-time defending champion, and his challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi, sprang small surprises, found refutations, took long thinks, scrambled. The tension rose, ebbed, and rose some more. Up until this game, the best-of-fourteen match between Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi had been a disappointment. With nine games to go, there had been five draws, all of them quite correct—computers can now precisely determine which move will give a player the greatest advantage, and these games were among the most accurately played in recorded history—and none of them particularly interesting.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The match had been billed as a contrast between styles. On one side, there was the preternatural perfectionism of Carlsen, perhaps the greatest player ever. On the other, Nepomniachtchi: aggressive, unpredictable. As a boy, Nepomniachtchi had been tapped as a tremendous talent; at thirty-one, he seemed to be rounding into form. The last two World Championships had gone to tiebreaks; in 2018, when Carlsen had played Fabiano Caruana, every game in the classical portion—that is, before the tiebreaks, which are played with faster time controls—had been a draw. This time, Carlsen was the clear favorite, but Nepomniachtchi is the only active top player with a positive classical score in his career against him. That’s mostly because of games the two played as children, but, still, it was a sign that something unusual might happen.

And, finally, in the sixth game, it did. Carlsen began boldly, gambiting a pawn in exchange for initiative. But Nepomniachtchi declined it, defending ably, and then made a risky move of his own, taking Carlsen’s queen in exchange for both of his rooks. On paper—or, rather, computer—the trade is a roughly equal one, but, by imbalancing the position, it opened up dynamic possibilities. A complex position emerged, and Nepomniachtchi, always a quick player, pressed his advantage on the clock. (At one point, Carlsen had only four minutes to make ten moves; if he did that, more time would be added to the clock.) The endgame was a complicated setup: Nepomniachtchi had his powerful queen, and Carlsen had a rook, a knight, and two pawns. With perfectly correct play, the contest would result in a draw. But, in practice, it was a difficult position for the queen to hold—particularly against Carlsen, who was moving his pieces in harmony. Nepomniachtchi made one inaccurate move, and, after nearly eight hours and a hundred and thirty-six moves, that was all that Carlsen needed to win what had become the longest game in World Championship history.

The game had ended after midnight. Later that same day, the pair returned to the board, and played, unsurprisingly, to an exhausted draw. Each passing round brought more pressure for Nepomniachtchi: he needed a win to level the match. That would have been hard enough facing only Carlsen, but he seemed to be engaged in a simultaneous battle against himself. In Game 8, he opted for a conservative opening, Petrov’s Defense, which has a drawish reputation. But his ensuing play was far from calm. He spent much of the game, as had become his habit, in a private room, away from the board, emerging only to move quickly, and, too often, recklessly. He gave up one pawn, and then another, and then the game. It was a “chain of slightly weird decisions,” he acknowledged afterward.

Game 9 was even more baffling. Nepomniachtchi chose an English opening, another unexpected strike, perhaps hoping to catch Carlsen off guard. It seemed to work: the game quickly entered uncharted territory, and Nepomniachtchi had the edge. Yet he still appeared hurried, and, before long, his lack of focus showed up on the board. He missed a chance to sacrifice a pawn for a stronger position—though that mistake would come to seem small compared with what happened soon after. Appearing from the wings, Nepomniachtchi walked quickly to the board, moved a pawn, and disappeared—unaware, he’d later admit, that across from him, and all around the world, the move had been regarded, immediately, with shock. “Is he nuts?” the grand master Anish Giri yelped, on live commentary provided by Chess24. “That is insane.” Carlsen’s face screwed up in disbelief, as he searched for some hint that, if he played the obvious response, he might give Nepomniachtchi a dangerous counterplay. But it was a blunder that even I would be embarrassed to make. Carlsen simply had to move his own pawn on the same file to trap Nepomniachtchi’s bishop.

In Game 10, Nepomniachtchi took everyone by surprise by playing Petrov’s Defense again—an unusual choice for a game he desperately needed to win. He seemed more concerned with avoiding another loss than trying to level the score. He managed a draw, but the result of the match, by this point, was foregone. He would need three wins in four games—an impossible task against Carlsen. For Game 11, he chose the Italian opening. The “quiet game,” as it’s known, offers some sharp chances, but Nepomniachtchi didn’t take them. Instead, he made moves that quickly allowed Carlsen to overcome the small disadvantage of beginning with the black pieces. The game seemed headed for another draw. Then Nepomniachtchi inexplicably pushed a pawn on his kingside that made his whole position fall apart. It may have been the most unbelievable move of all—not a missed tactic or an immediately blundered piece, but a move that betrayed a complete misunderstanding of what was happening on the board. Either that, or it was the self-sabotage of a man who just wanted to be done.

In the past few years, much has been made of the rise of powerful chess engines and their effect on classical chess. Purists complain that players have become over-reliant on rote memorization, that games have become too even, predictable, and dull. Carlsen famously dislikes the influence of chess engines, relying instead on his tremendous intuition—though he employs seconds who study positions on those engines very closely. Part of his genius is for finding the line that computers might not deem the best or most accurate but which is nonetheless the most challenging one for his opponent to figure out. It’s sometimes described as his “human touch.”

Watching him in this World Championship, though, he struck me as more superhuman than ever, not only for his vision over the board but for his mental stamina. Game 6 had been as even as possible, and yet he had turned it into a series of cascading advantages. As Carlsen made steady, calculated moves, Nepomniachtchi seemed to unravel. Carlsen played the match as he plays endgames, pushing his opponents degree by degree, until they make the move that confirms that they are, in fact, what they already feel: lost.