World chess rivalry: no return to the cold war

A series of tie-breakers – rapidplay games, blitz games with very short time controls, and even a so-called “Armageddon” game where the player with the disadvantage of the black pieces and less time on the clock only has to draw the game to win the title – will determine who is champion. It is the chess equivalent of a penalty shootout and would have horrified the purist former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, founder of the Soviet chess system, who, when asked whether he ever played blitz, replied that yes, he had played it once, on a train.

Wednesday is Carlsen’s 26th birthday, and he will be strong favourite to triumph – he won both the world rapidplay and blitz championships in 2014. A Carlsen victory would suit chess fans, sponsors and federations in the west: he is personable, good looking (at least compared with the average chess player) and presents an image of chess as a tough sport rather than a pastime for elderly gentlemen in draughty church halls. “Smart is the new sexy”, Carlsen likes to say, which again would not have been a sentiment shared by Botvinnik.

It is tempting to draw Karjakin as the villain of the piece – a Ukrainian who became a Russian citizen in 2009, is portrayed as “more Putin than Putin”, and who supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 despite having grown up there as a Ukrainian citizen. The Carlsen-Karjakin tussle recalls an age of ideological rivalry. It is tempting for the chess media to present the battle in New York as a clash between east and west in the grand tradition of the 1972 match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavík. But for the most part the latter temptation has been resisted: in an age of global upheaval, the icy certainties of the cold war just can’t be recreated.

We should similarly give Karjakin, who is also 26 and was the world’s youngest ever grandmaster at the absurd age of 12, the benefit of the doubt. It is wrong to portray him as a Ukrainian turncoat. He is an ethnic Russian who chose to side with Moscow on both patriotic and pragmatic grounds – in Russia he could get more skilled coaches and attract more sponsors. We can question the wisdom of his close identification with Vladimir Putin, but it is as a chess player that we should judge him. In this match he has proved a redoubtable competitor and a benign, perpetually smiling presence in the postmortems after each game. It was Carlsen who, disgusted at his own performance, stormed out of a press conference after his shock defeat with white in game eight. Carlsen will probably retain his title, but Karjakin would not be an unworthy 17th world champion. After all, politics is only politics, but chess is chess.