White Knights of Dubai
A World Chess Championship diary...
Back in 1972, the philosopher George Steiner would publish a series of articles that were a little off the beaten of his recent publications. Squeezed in between the publication of his Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (1972) and Nostalgia for the Absolute (1974), Steiner had found time to take a short trip to Iceland and rattle off a series of columns for The New Yorker.
For those of you with some inkling of the peaks and troughs of chess history, 1972 is something of a watershed moment: the point in time that we moved from BC to AD. This was the year of Spassky-Fischer, the World Championship which would throw chess into the limelight in a way it had never been thrown before or since. And luckily for us, George Steiner was there to recount the event for us in writing.
Steiner’s columns would later appear in monograph form as White Knights of Reykjavik, a whistle-stop tour through the history of the World Chess Championships, the lives of Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, and a summary of the competition itself. In the preface to the monograph, Steiner wrote:
This sketch is meant neither for the expert chess player nor the professional historian of the game. Both would find its references to specific games and analytic problems either too elementary or too allusive. I am in no way a qualified analyst of chess and my own game is, by any serious standard, risible. But like countless other patzers the world over, I was fascinated by the affair at Reykjavik and by the psychological, political, personal aspects of the Fischer-Spassky match. In this short memoir I have tried to capture something of the bizarre drama of the occasion and something of the autistic passion which lies behind it.
On Wednesday the 24th of November this year, another World Chess Championship match will open in the Dubai Exhibition Centre. During the course of this match, the current World Champion, Magnus Carlsen, will face a challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi. The winner will be declared the current World Champion.
A lot has changed since 1972. Chess inhabits a different place in the cultural imagination. The World Chess Championships of 2021 will not be hitting the spotlight in quite the same way as its counterpart in 1972. In fact, so far has the game fallen as a public phenomenon that the match is being bolted on to the previously postponed Expo 2020 Dubai.
This raises questions of its own. Back in 1972, the match itself was made possible after a donation from a British investment banker, Jim Slater, induced Bobby Fischer to compete. Half a century later, the British investment banker has been replaced by the Public Investment Funds of authoritarian states and the producers of breast enhancement and reconstructive technology.
Beyond this, chess itself has entered its own brave new world: a world of computers and engines and neural networks. Where 1972 had already seen the protogenesis of the shift to technology in chess, the availability of this shift to the professionals was still out of reach. In 2021, preparation for the World Chess Championships will be steeped in digital reference.
In many respects, these leaps and bounds (and perhaps backwards steps in the case of the financial investment into chess) mean that the 2021 World Chess Championship is almost unrecognisable from its earlier iteration. What propelled Spassky-Fischer into the centre stage in the 70s was the dramatic aspect to the proceedings. Would Fischer compete? Was this an enactment of the Cold War that was percolating around them? Was this the start of a new era of chess?
2021 promises almost nothing of this sort of drama. Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi, for all their personality, are not Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. It would by nigh-on impossible to compete at the highest levels of chess with the sort of frenetic lifestyle that Fischer displayed in ‘72. Chess excellence in the 21st Century is about hard work, clean living and—for the most part—slick PR.
And yet there is something which, in the words of Steiner, “fascinates me about the psychological, political, personal aspects of the [Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi] match.” This newsletter will be my attempt to follow the tournament and give you a sense of where this fascination comes from.
I’ll be trying to post most days during the running of the tournament. Feel free to subscribe if you want each issue directly into your inbox. I will only be running this digest through the course of the match and so the emails will dry up soon after the final move is played. I will be tweeting each of the pieces from my Twitter account too so following me over there will also mean you won’t miss anything.
Enjoy the chess!