The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Chesser

All I knew was that you had to run, run, run without knowing why you were running, but on you went through fields you didn't understand and into woods that made you afraid, over hills without knowing you'd been up and down, and shooting across streams that would have cut the heart out of you had you fallen into them. And the winning post was no end to it, even though crowds might be cheering you in, because on you had to go before you got your breath back, and the only time you stopped really was when you tripped over a tree trunk and broke your neck or fell into a disused well and stayed dead in the darkness forever.

Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

I don’t want to have to write this. Ideally, I would just write, “A man lost a game of chess” and leave it at that. After all, that is what happened. But if that was all that happened, I suppose I wouldn’t be writing this in the first place.

I began this World Chess Championship newsletter prompted by George Steiner’s chess writing. Steiner seemed fascinated by what he calls the “metaphysical triviality or irresponsibility” of chess. That’s a fancy (or pretentious… almost certainly pretentious) way of saying: “chess doesn’t really matter” But if it doesn’t matter, why does it hurt so much?

My good friend JJ Lang summed up Game 9 of the World Chess Championship as well as anybody could hope to:

Is there a German word for witnessing someone lose a match by cracking under psychological pressure so painfully that you feel as if you, yourself, were the one losing the match? If not, there’s a Russian-ish word now: Nepomniatchi-itis. Too bad ‘nepotism’ is taken.

There are different manners in which to lose World Championship matches. You can do a Fabiano Caruana and match Magnus Carlsen blow-for-blow and only get turned over in the rapid play element. You can do a Sergei Karjakin and get as close as you can hope to winning the match before losing the last game and then getting turned over in the rapid play element. You can do a Vishy Anand and lose gallantly to a young up-and-comer. Or you can do a Vladimir Kramnik and win three, lose three and scrape it in the rapid play.

But whatever you do… Don’t do what Ian Nepomniachtchi does. Don’t play scintillatingly good chess for seven games and then blunder in consecutive games. Here’s why: Nepomniachtchi played some of the best chess the World Chess Championship has ever seen. And he will go away remembered as the dude who collapsed against Magnus Carlsen before the epic battles between Carlsen and Alireza Firouzja.

In many respects, Game 9 was no different. Until move 27, Nepomniachtchi had been the same Nepomniachtchi that we had seen in the first six games. This was smart chess. Well-prepared chess. An unbalanced position with possibilities. And an opponent rapidly approaching time trouble. What more could you hope for in a World Championship game?

But then move 27. c5. A blunder. And not a Super Grandmaster blunder. The sort that goes unnoticed by mere mortals without reference to an engine. A common and garden blunder of local club player magnitude. This was giving away a minor piece. This was losing-against-a-Super-Grandmaster-every-time-your-only-hope-is-an-outside-chance-of-time-trouble blunder.

How do you write about this? What is there to say? With one small pawn push for a man, you write yourself into the history books forever. There is no logic that can encompass it. Nothing makes sense of it. Whereas Game 8 is explicated by Game 6. Game 9 is not in Kansas anymore, Toto territory. It is outlier. Unprecedent.

You could see that in Carlsen’s response. You could see that in Nepomniachtchi’s face when he finally returned to the board after a 15 minute stretch in his player’s lounge. This is pain. Not for one man. This is a shared pain for the collective chess-watching community. No one wants to see this. This is not entertainment.

This is the loneliness of the long-distance chesser. In Alan Sillitoe’s short story, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the protagonist talks about the—to bastardise Steiner somewhat—metaphysical gravitas of running. It wasn’t that running itself was serious for Smith, a working-class boy from Nottingham who had been sent to the Borstal for robbing a bakery. It was that it gradually came to represent something larger for him: a correlate for life itself.

The winning post was no end to it, even though crowds might be cheering you in, because on you had to go before you got your breath back, and the only time you stopped really was when you tripped over a tree trunk and broke your neck or fell into a disused well and stayed dead in the darkness forever.

This is the thing: on the one hand, Game 9 was just a game of chess. But on the other hand, this is Ian Nepomniachtchi’s life. It’s almost impossible to extricate the one from the other. The reason why we feel the pain alongside Nepomniachtchi is, I think, because we recognise this. This isn’t just a lost game. This becomes reality for Nepomniachtchi.

In the film of the same name as Sillitoe’s short story, the film poster’s byline reads: “You can play it by rules... or you can play it by ear – WHAT COUNTS is that you play it right for you...” Through the course of the story, Smith eventually comes to realise that he can take control in his own life. Not by breaking out from the context and running away—something he’s tried to do throughout his life—but by not running for once.

This may be small comfort to Ian Nepomniachtchi. But it could be that he is faced with a similar possibility. Perhaps he can take control here in some small sense. Not by running away but by staying and fighting for what remains.

I didn’t want to have to write this. Ideally, I would have just written, “A man lost a game of chess” and left it at that. But it will give me no greater pleasure if, at the conclusion of this World Chess Championship match, I can write “Ian Nepomniachtchi stayed and fought.”