Luke McShane

Fresh start

Chess offers one ultimate consolation in defeat: the opportunity to set the pieces up and start again. At least in theory, a new game is a clean slate, and a release from past tribulations. But in practice, sometimes one simply cannot manage to air out the miasma of what came before.

In the second half of the world championship match held in Dubai last month, Ian Nepomniachtchi was unrecognisable. Magnus Carlsen had landed a devastating blow in the sixth game, in a match hitherto tied at 2.5-2.5. His win, lasting 136 moves and almost eight hours (see my article of 11 December), seemed to utterly demoralise the challenger. A cascade of blunders in subsequent games allowed Carlsen to retain his title with a 7.5-3.5 victory.

A couple of weeks later, right after Christmas, both players were in Warsaw for the world rapid championships. The classical world championship is decided in match play, but the rapid event throws well over a hundred grandmasters into a single event, lasting three days. The four-way tie for first place on 9.5/13 included familiar names Carlsen, Caruana and, to his great credit, Nepomniachtchi, who went through the event without a loss, apparently no longer fazed by his drubbing in Dubai. The fourth name was a revelation: Nodirbek Abdusattorov, just 17 years old. The Uzbek teenager became a grandmaster at age 13, but to triumph among the world elite is a splendid breakthrough. The vagaries of the tiebreak system were widely criticised, but the upshot was that Carlsen and Caruana were excluded from the playoff, from which Abdusattorov emerged as the champion.

It took great imagination to save a precarious position against another talented teenager from India. In the diagram position, Abdusattorov’s knight on d3 is in danger since 23…Nxc5 24 Rc1 wins a piece and 23…Qe4 24 Bxd3 Qxd3+ 25 Qxd3 Rxd3 26 Rxf4 yields an unappetising endgame.

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