Magnus Carlsen has again stated that he is “unlikely” to defend his world title against the winner of the eight-player Candidates scheduled for Madrid in June and explained that he felt more comfortable in the years before 2013 when he was ranked No 1 but had not yet defeated India’s Vishy Anand in the world title match in Chennai. Since then Carlsen has won five championship matches – twice against Anand, and one each against Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, Fabiano Caruana of the US, and Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Carlsen’s statement, made in an interview with the Norwegian newspaper VG, goes further than when he last spoke about the title following his crushing win over Nepomniachtchi in December. Then his stance was that he would only play a challenger from a younger generation, which pointed to 18-year-old Alireza Firouzja, formerly of Iran and now of France, who in 2021 became the youngest in chess history to achieve a 2800 rating, a recognised level for world champions and challengers.
This time there is no reference to Firouzja, who has played little since his successes of last autumn, but is assumed to have been preparing opening bombs and is still firmly installed among the Candidates favourites.
Against Firouzja is the poor record of teenage candidates, as Bobby Fischer (twice), Boris Spassky and Carlsen himself all failed to win, while the youngest ever world champions remain Garry Kasparov and Carlsen at age 22, followed by Mikhail Tal and Anatoly Karpov at 23.
That still leaves a practical question which will be answered only in June. Will Carlsen still abandon his title if the challenger’s backers can increase the prize fund considerably from its present level of €2m? The amounts now are much larger, but the problem is essentially the same as in 1972 when Bobby Fischer dithered in New York when the opening ceremony of his series against Spassky was due to start in Reykjavik.
That historic match, and the global chess boom which followed it, were saved when the then Fide president, Max Euwe, postponed the match for two days, during which the English financier and chess enthusiast Jim Slater doubled the prize fund from $125,000 to $250,000 and Fischer took the next plane out to Iceland.
If either of the two Americans, Caruana or Hikaru Nakamura, becomes the official challenger there must be a serious chance of a bid from Rex Sinquefield, the billionaire who has made his home city St Louis into a global chess centre and is an admirer of Fischer, who he once met on a plane journey and exhorted him to “beat those Russians”. Sinquefield, if he wished, could afford to double the prize fund as an echo of 1972.
There are also plausible scenarios where Carlsen refuses to play and, following Fide rules, the winner and runner-up meet for the world championship. That would effectively produce two world champions, as happened between 1993 and 2006, a 13-year hiatus which would probably be much shorter this time due to the widespread wish for a new reunification match.
While Firouzja is the principal teenage contender, others are improving fast. Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, 16, won this month’s Reykjavik Open and is already being hailed by some Indian media as the next world champion.
Carlsen and Praggnanandhaa are both among the eight competitors in the Oslo Esports Cup, starting on Friday at 5pm. This is an online event but with the difference that all the players will be based in the same broadcasting studio. It is the third event in the 2022 Meltwater Champions Tour and Carlsen, who won the 2021 Tour and both the first two tournaments in 2022, will be aiming to continue his monopoly. However, Praggnanandhaa defeated the world champion in February at the Airthings Masters to become the youngest player to beat Carlsen in serious competition.
Praggnanandhaa’s achievements are being fully matched on an age to rating yardstick by Abhimanyu Mishra, 13, and Dommaraju Gukesh, 15. Mishra became the youngest ever grandmaster at 12, beating the longstanding age record set by Karjakin in 2002, He achieved his title via all-play-all tournaments in Budapest which were criticised as too artificial, but at Reykjavik Mishra answered his critics by sharing second prize. His rating has advanced well into the 2500s, and serious Californian money is backing him to rise to the top.
Gukesh is a year younger than Praggnanandhaa, but has already broken into the world top 100 players. The 15-year-old has come a long way from four years ago when his behaviour when winning on time in a lost position angered Nigel Short.
Gukesh’s style at Reykjavik and when taking first at La Roda last weekend showed a fiercely accurate and economical style with a variety of standard openings. Almost all his wins at La Roda were in under 30 moves and it was like watching the teenage Fischer and Spassky in the 1950s.
Two games stood out. One as Black, where he castled short before storming the white king with his K-side pawns, and the other as White against an international master, where his h4-h5-h6 push stymied Black’s defensive options.
3812 1 Qe8+ Kh7 2 Ng5+! hxg5 3 Rh3+ Kg6 4 Rh6+! and if Kxh6 5 Qh8+ Kg6 5 Qh5 mate or if gxh6 6 Qg8 mate.
• This article was amended on 23 April 2022 to amend misspellings of Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa’s surname.
