And on the Seventh Day, They Rested

Game 7 of the World Chess Championship was the equal and opposite reaction to Game 6...

What a difference a day makes. Over the course of the first five gamedays of the World Chess Championships, we spent much of the time tying ourselves in knots trying to “solve” the disease of drawitis that it was generally agreed had infected modern matchplay.

Had Game 7 happened immediately after Game 5, this discourse would likely have reached a crescendo. The doors of the FIDE offices charged down. A tearing up of the rulebooks. Increasingly subtle time control tweaks. We might have entered the shadowland of suggestions that moves incurring a 0 centipawn loss should be met with a swift tazering for the guilty party.

Fortunately for us, there was the small matter of Game 6. An eight-hour epic which saw Magnus Carlsen pick up his first World Championship win since 2016, this game inverts the narratives and gives us a new perspective on the place of the draw within the match.

Much of our problem with conceptualising the place of a draw in the World Championship cycle comes from a problem of perspective. It’s tempting to think of a 14-game match as anything other than a random assortment of 14 individual games of chess. But it is important not to miss the aggregative element of the game.

Of course, we know that issues of stamina and longevity come into it. Lord knows we’ve been reminded of the physical regimes these players are keeping. Carlsen with his regular rest day sports games. Nepomniachtchi with his weight-loss programme. But there is a tendency to forget that the shift from Game n to Game n+1 isn’t merely a simple shift from one state of affairs to another. When Game 6 ground to a close just after midnight in Dubai, the players were expected to attend a press conference, eat a meal, sleep and prep for the next game which was starting the same day as the last one finished.

It should come as little surprise, then, that when Game 7 rolled around, there was not a huge amount of novelty on show. Nepomniachtchi—with the white pieces—didn’t deviate from his previous openings. We saw another Ruy Lopez in the anti-Marshall line. Nepomniachtchi’s more recently favoured a4 push reappeared along with Carlsen’s response Rb8. This time, though, we got the less gregarious d3 rather than c3, allowing the Russian to bring his knight on b1 to c3 instead.

And from here the game gently percolated towards 0.00. There were some potential wrinkles; moments where the was the merest suggestion of an edge in the game. But Nepomniachtchi was happy to accept the smoothest course whenever it was presented to him. In the end, when Nepomniachtchi pushed c5 to see what would happen, Carlsen slid past the pawn with his queen and the liquidation began. By move 30, there was nothing left but a symmetrical position and the players shuffled their pieces until the 40th move: the point at which they could offer a draw.

Could you blame them? In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God creates the world in six days and on the seventh, he rested. In World Chess Championship tradition, Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi created Game 6 in six days. And on the seventh, they rested.

This is a draw that helps us come to terms with the draw as a concept in matchplay (and not least because we needed that draw as much as the players). It reminds us that this is an aggregation; a piling up of game upon game on day after day. And just as the Judeo-Christian tradition has a concept of taking it easy hard-baked into it, so does the World Chess Championship.