On the Chess Circuit

On​ the morning of 18 April 2023, the chess grandmaster Ding Liren, the highest-rated Chinese player of all time, was discussing tactics with his coach. He was due to play game 7 of his world championship match against Ian Nepomniachtchi (known to chess fans as Nepo) that afternoon. They were tied 3-3; the first player to seven and a half points would inherit the crown that had been voluntarily surrendered by Magnus Carlsen, who chose not to compete. Game 7 was crucial: a victory would carry with it significant momentum. Ding’s second was Richárd Rapport, a long-haired Hungarian, the fifth best player in the world at the time and a grandmaster since the age of thirteen. Months earlier, Ding had jokingly suggested trying the French Defence in the forthcoming world championship, a gamble that might surprise Nepo and put him off his game. Rapport, who is famous for his risk-taking, said that the moment had arrived.

The French Defence is thought to date back centuries but takes its name from a game played by correspondence between the Paris and London chess clubs in 1834. In response to white’s first move of a pawn to e4, black nudges his pawn on the same file, just one square to e6. It’s a treacherous attack from the outset, a boxer emerging from his corner arms swinging. But just as a boxer must compromise his guard in order to throw his punches, the French Defence weakens as it advances. Black is initially surrendering space in the centre of the board, space he hopes to regain later. But he will probably fret about his queenside bishop, which is immediately blocked. And in a game built on infinities, there follows a dizzying array of subsequent sidelines and complications: Winawer, Burn, McCutcheon, Steinitz, the Rubenstein and so on. For this reason, the French isn’t much taught to beginners.

What unfolded over the next few hours was one of the most astonishing mental disintegrations witnessed in grandmaster chess. Nepo did indeed open with e4, as expected. But it took Ding 55 seconds to play e6. Why, if he had committed to the French Opening beforehand, did he not respond immediately? Was he paralysed by doubt? After this pause, the game settled down. In the middle game there was some sparring and Ding was put in potential jeopardy. But he kept his chances alive, consistently finding the best possible move, at least according to the online commentators and computer engines purring in the background. A bishop advance of Ding’s put Nepo under pressure and, deep into the fourth hour, it seemed that Ding had a small advantage. But time was ticking. The players must reach forty moves within the two hours on their clocks, at which point they are awarded another thirty minutes, with thirty-second increments per move. In classical chess, good time management is essential.

On move 32, with a little under six minutes remaining on his clock, Ding froze. Nepo vacated his chair and paced around, while Ding sat at the board, alone and unmoving, his chin propped on his hand as the clock ticked down. Online, the chess world watched in horror. Commentators shouted at the screen: ‘Move, Ding, move!’ Finally, after four minutes and 54 seconds, he advanced his rook to d2 (the consensus was that this was the wrong choice). Now he had only 45 seconds to complete eight moves and keep himself in the game. He had lost his way spectacularly and it wasn’t long before he extended his hand in resignation.

My son, Charlie, discovered chess in the run-up to that world championship two years ago. He was ten and had come across the YouTube chess star Levy Rozman, known online as GothamChess, a Russian-American with whom young enthusiasts all over the world are obsessed. My chess is rudimentary bordering on hopeless, but for that first fortnight of Charlie’s chess career I could still beat him. I felt secretly pleased. Over the second fortnight, however, I began to lose. By the time Ding and Nepo faced each other in Kazakhstan a month later, I had to accept that I would never again beat my son at chess.

Charlie was living and breathing the game, rushing straight to his room after school to play on chess.com. We watched the world championship together online and felt a part of the collective exasperation that implored Ding to move in that game. Charlie joined the local chess club, where he acquired a raft of new friends, most of them thirty or forty years older than him. He taught himself openings, read books about endgames, sharpened his play with puzzle drills and repeatedly watched a documentary about Magnus Carlsen. One scene stuck with him: in 2013, a blindfolded Carlsen took on ten Harvard-educated lawyers (and amateur chess players) simultaneously, shouting out his moves, holding all ten boards with their evolving stories of 32 pieces in his head. He won all ten games.

Towards the end of 2023, Charlie made his first tentative steps onto the under-12 tournament circuit. Our new lives began, of long days in draughty church halls, school gymnasiums on the outskirts of London, trains to Ealing, Potter’s Bar, Catford, Richmond, Cheam. Most of the children had been playing for years, many with coaches in the background, but Charlie made rapid progress. Once, in Coulsdon Community Centre, where in 1946 Field Marshal Montgomery gave a talk about ‘man and the atomic bomb’, Charlie emerged visibly shaking after a game with the top seed. Without quite knowing how, he had managed to find a rook sacrifice manoeuvre that allowed him to create a mating net, his pieces working in unison to block off all escape routes for his opponent’s king. That afternoon he experienced the beauty of chess, a height of mental calculation that suddenly made sense of all the hundreds of hours he had invested in learning about it. He talked about that one game for days, and I realised that chess wasn’t going to be a passing interest.

Charlie was instinctively playing in a style that one of his new friends at the club described as Romantic. Over the centuries, chess has evolved around a collective adherence to various strategies. In the 18th century, the Philidor era, the mobility of the pawns and their various structures concentrated the mind. This was replaced by the Modenese School, a theory of chess that emerged from Italy and focused on the quick development of the pieces. Romantic chess arose in the 19th century, a dashing style characterised by the use of flourishes and traps. Winning with style is the priority, losing in style perfectly acceptable. One of the most famous games, the epitome of Romantic chess, is the ‘Immortal Game’ between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in London in 1851. Anderssen won by sacrificing his major material in the service of developing a mating pattern with his minor pieces. The game – reproduced in Blade Runner when Sebastian checkmates Tyrell – contains strategies that are frowned on now, even as they are celebrated. There was something of the spirit of the Immortal Game flowing through Charlie that afternoon in Coulsdon.

The Romantic style was killed off 150 years ago when Wilhelm Steinitz, the first recognised world champion, started beating opponents by taking a more positional approach. The game has continued to morph – the Classical School, the Hypermodern School, the Soviet School – and we are now in the age of the supercomputer. Stockfish and other powerful chess engines are today part of any player’s tools, whether you are Ding Liren or a young boy playing in Streatham Library, where Charlie was spending every Tuesday night.

Over the spring and summer of 2024 Charlie continued to improve. Day trips became whole weekends in cheap hotels outside London. At the National Youth Championships Finals in Nottingham – five games of classical chess over two and a half days – he managed to come third, two places behind Ruqayyah Rida, one of the most talented English girls ever to have played the game. In reality, oceans of ability lay between Charlie and Rida; he was just thrilled to find himself on an adjacent board to her. But he was also developing new levels of patience: one of his games in Nottingham drifted well into the fourth hour. Even at this level chess is strictly regulated and parents aren’t allowed in the playing hall. Occasionally I am able to glimpse him through a window, hunched over his board, lost in concentration. I try to read his body language, but he gives little away. In Players and Pawns, Gary Alan Fine suggests that ‘part of the beauty of chess is its experienced quality … the capacity of people to focus on an activity so closely that they lose awareness of time, external surroundings and self-consciousness. Such experiences become autotelic, as the boundaries between self and activity fade.’ When, win or lose, Charlie and I reunite after a tournament game, he has the dazed look of a scuba diver resurfacing from the deep.

Despite the loss against Nepo in game 7, Ding fought back over the following week. With the match tied 7-7, a deciding day of rapidplay was required – a series of games of short duration where instinct rather than deep calculation comes to the fore. Ding triumphed. But by November last year, when he sat down in Singapore to defend his title against one of the great calculators of the game, 18-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju from India, he was in serious decline. He hadn’t won any of his previous twenty games and had fallen out of the top twenty in the world rankings. Occasionally he had found himself in winning positions, only to blunder his way to a draw or a loss. He had talked about losing his joy for chess, his struggles with his mental health. The world championship is always a competition between the previous winner and the best challenger; most fans thought that the 2024 final would be a non-event. When asked about Ding’s chances, chess greats – Carlsen, Nakamura, Caruana – would wince and shake their heads. Ding is respected and liked (Rapport calls him the ‘peaceful warrior’), but everyone feared for him. When interviewed, he admitted that a heavy loss to Gukesh was a distinct possibility.

Gukesh learned to play at the age of seven, caught up in the wave of Indian interest in chess that followed Viswanathan Anand’s success in the early 2000s. His father gave up his career as a surgeon to support his son’s rise, travelling around the world with him to attend tournaments. In 2019, aged just twelve, Gukesh became the second youngest grandmaster in history. Five years later, he earned his place opposite Ding by winning the gruelling Candidates Tournament in which potential challengers compete to face the world champion.

After shaking hands with Ding, Gukesh got down to business, moving his king’s pawn to e4 and punching his clock. Ding knotted his brow in concentration. He reached out and pushed his pawn to e6: the French. In 138 years of world championship chess, the French has been played just three times in the opening game, and forty times in all. Of those forty games, black, Ding’s less favourable pieces for this first game, had gone on to win on only three occasions. Ding hadn’t played the French since the championship game eighteen months earlier. Chess fans held their breath.

Ding Liren during game 14 of the 2024 world championship.

Over the next two hours, Ding was slumped at the table. The anxiety and mental turmoil that had characterised his game since the previous final seemed to be resurfacing. He wouldn’t pause for a sip of water or get up to stretch his legs. Gukesh, by contrast, moved his pieces calmly, confidently. The championship had barely begun, but he already had the appearance of a champion-in-waiting. Commentators admired his brave and provocative early g4 pawn push, something of a novelty but a move he must have fixed on in his preparation since he took only twenty seconds to make it, quickly transferring the pressure of the clock back to his opponent. Ding seemed increasingly paralysed, even despondent, searching his memory for the next move, shaking his head, the time ticking away. By move 14, he was nearly an hour behind on the clock.

But then, slowly, his body language began to change. He became less agitated – a sign that his head was clearing and he had at last found a balance between intuition and deep calculation. He raised himself up in his chair. The position on the board was equalising, and by move 17 the online chess engines showed that it was marginally more dangerous for Gukesh. The clocks started to level out too: Gukesh spent 35 minutes deciding a single move, his chair vibrating up and down as he jiggled his legs. Ding looked focused. His moves were precise. Considering the difficulties of the previous two years, this sequence was one of the finest of his career.

But his position was still precarious. He didn’t castle until move 31, exceptionally late in the game. And then his attention turned back to the e file, where four hours earlier he had activated the French with that brave pawn push. He advanced his pawn again – the only move, the computers suggested, that would prevent him from losing. Now down to 24 seconds to make six moves, Gukesh had little time for calculation. He managed move 40 with a mere second to spare, but now he was the one slumped at the table, his head in his hands. For the first time in more than four hours, Ding rose from his chair and marched off to snack on some walnuts. A few minutes later, Gukesh offered his hand in resignation. The championship was suddenly set alight.

The image of a chessboard with pieces in play contains a tangle of symbolic suggestions, many of them violent. Freudians read chess as an arena of Oedipal urges – the protection of the king denotes a fear of castration, the queen’s freedom on the board indicates her dominance and sexual power. The chess I’ve witnessed at prepubescent tournament level certainly carries relational issues. It strikes me that some of the boys – and they are mainly boys – bring to the game the ghostly chess lives of their fathers. I want Charlie to win, of course, but what happens to him when the door to the playing hall is shut, even as he later relates it, is a mystery to me. I am a bemused onlooker, unable to analyse the games with him afterwards in the way so many of the other fathers, fine players themselves, can. Chess has brought us closer – we spend vast amounts of time together on the circuit – but it comes freighted with melancholy. I watch Charlie disappearing ever deeper through the board into a private plane of social order and its attendant threats, of feints and traps, of fleeting elegance and neat satisfactions and crushing disappointments – a world in his head that mirrors my own, but which I’m unable to access. As he plays chess, I feel him leaving me.

In Singapore, Gukesh came roaring back with a win in game 3, and Ding again seemed distressed and flustered. Over the next fortnight there followed a series of draws, until game 11, when, despite Gukesh’s taking more than an hour on a single move, Ding went on to make a blunder by putting his queen on the back rank, a slip from which he couldn’t recover. Gukesh went into a 6-5 lead which most critics assumed would be decisive. It was familiar territory for Ding, who in 2023 had trailed Nepo going into the final games. The next day, despite being out of preparation as early as move 6, Ding played some of the most sublime chess he had managed in years. Slowly, relentlessly, he made incremental improvements to his position, tightening the vice until Gukesh had no choice but to resign.

The opening of game 13 returned us to where it had all begun nearly three weeks earlier: the French. This time, Gukesh took an unusual developing line with white and again Ding went into deep, prolonged calculation. By move 8 he was already an hour down on the clock. The advantage went back and forth between them, and at one point Ding seemed to be in despair. But Gukesh missed chances, Ding rallied and a draw was agreed.

With the championship tied 6½-6½, a win in the fourteenth game would prove decisive. Ding wasn’t expected to lose with the white pieces, but many people anticipated a draw, which would mean that the title would again be decided by rapidplay. Ding appeared to have the better position in the middle game, but he played timidly, afraid of exposing himself, and by trading off his pieces diluted any small advantage he had. When he chose to go into a rook and bishop endgame a pawn down, observers weren’t unduly alarmed, thinking a draw almost certain. But his clock was low, as it had been for much of the tournament. And then, on move 55, he slid his rook to f2.

Rook f2 will haunt Ding for the rest of his days. For a moment Gukesh didn’t register what had happened (he later admitted that he was already preparing mentally for the play-off). But suddenly he sat up in his chair. His hands came up as if in prayer, a look of amazement on his face, a look which Ding registered with horror. Gukesh could simply exchange rooks, followed by a bishop swap, leaving Ding’s king with no defence against the extra pawn. The exchanges were made and Ding resigned and departed. Gukesh sat at the table in shock, the youngest ever world champion.

After the championship, Charlie and I could talk about little except that rook move. Even though we are both fans of Gukesh, we had followed Ding’s trials so closely we couldn’t bear to see him blunder at that critical moment. We both had a sense of how it must feel. Even at Charlie’s level, and in a boy who responds well to losing, I see how a particular type of mistake preys on the mind, lingering and nagging at his confidence. He was still discussing Rf2 a fortnight later when the under-12 London Junior Chess Championships began, nine games of classical chess over three days (around eight hours of play per day).

On the third evening, Charlie went into the final game with the near certainty of a top ten finish should he win it. He’d played very well throughout the tournament – he’d won a particularly satisfying game earlier that day with a Steinitz Variation of the French – and now he had 60 of the field of 74 behind him. But he was exhausted, and up against Kai Beattie, a tricky player who often puts in an extremely rare move in the opening in the hope of unsettling his opponent. Charlie and Kai had never been matched before. I wanted him to win so badly, and didn’t want to show it. A final point would make him a candidate for the England squad.

Charlie emerged from the hall two hours later. The moment I saw his face, I knew that he had lost. Kai did indeed play a curveball opening move: a6. The engines showed that Charlie dealt with it well, and in fact had the better of the early exchanges. But in the middle game Kai ramped up the pressure and Charlie began to buckle, resigning on move 33. We walked back to the Tube station together. ‘I know I shouldn’t get upset,’ he said, and buried his head in his scarf.