Wednesday, November 30, was the final day of the championship. It was also Magnus Carlsen’s twenty-sixth birthday. With sudden death’s accelerated play and claustrophobically limited amounts of time, this version of Carlsen and Karjakin’s duel would be messier, each step even more treacherous and unforgiving. It would expose their hearts as much as their minds, as this kind of chess was inescapably more reliant on primal instincts than careful preparation.
Again, the chess purists hated it—hated that after more than three deliberate, painstaking weeks a championship should be decided in such a crude fashion. It was the same argument soccer purists have against the World Cup being decided by a shootout. But most everyone I spoke to relished that the title should be decided by the world’s top two chess players essentially engaged in a game of intellectual hot potato with a make-believe grenade.
If chess were a religion, its adherents would make it the fourth largest in existence. And even under the frigid drizzle falling from a pigeon shit–gray sky, a mob of hundreds of the faith’s most fervent acolytes—hordes of wide-eyed, adorable chess nerd kids among them—formed an hour before the doors opened, their bated breath floating visibly in the air. Meanwhile, around the corner, at the VIP entrance, a swath of 1 percenters arrived and were instantly let in, ready to sink their fangs into the lifeblood of the game and suck out its vitality for useful photos to hang on the wall at business meetings.
The tailored suits and elegantly clad women showing off their jewelry thrust on the event the unwanted feeling of a museum gala. You couldn’t smell chess’s thick aroma for all the expensive perfume. Suddenly it felt like I was back at the Plaza Hotel on opening night of the championship, before Carlsen and Karjakin’s games had scraped off all the polish and let chess breathe again. It just made way too much sense that the honorary first move of sudden death was to be made by Peter Thiel. Silicon Valley billionaire. Donald Trump advisor. Ann Coulter confidant (“My biggest hero other than Trump,” she once said). Hulk Hogan–Gawker lawsuit bankroller. And, apparently, former chess prodigy who at the time was ranked 962 in the US and 21,930 internationally.
Organizers had announced that more than ten million people from around the world were watching the event live over the internet. Norway television was broadcasting the game in prime time. When I got up to the VIP room and negotiated my way through the flutter of European and Russian accents hanging over the martinis and hors d’oeuvre trays, I tossed my notebook and jacket down on my usual couch one last time next to Frank Brady. He was serenely staring out the window at the Brooklyn Bridge moping under the sad, overcast sky. Brady smiled.
“Perfect chess weather outside, don’t you think?” he said.
I overheard someone saying that Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, had arrived. Just then I noticed a roped-off section of the room nearby that appeared to be a double VIP room, with two stiff, utterly paranoid-looking, imposing men standing guard, and extra-exclusive catered food laid out. Cynic though I was, I had to admit: the mini-tacos looked delicious.
In the corner, I noticed Thiel’s face, which in repose resembles that of a particularly disgruntled electric eel. He was sitting at a board. And who was across from him? Oh yes, the creepy Scandinavian grandmaster I had met on the first day. He had all the social graces of spam email made flesh, someone who had spent three weeks at the match feverishly soliciting endless phone numbers, business cards, and email addresses for possible future business dealings. And now, on the last day of the match, he’d hit pay dirt! A guy whose estimated worth was higher than some countries’ GDP! The pair looked good together.
Incredibly, Thiel wasn’t even the richest guy in the room. That was Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner, who had roughly $3.7 billion to Thiel’s $2.5 billion.
Just as I noticed him, one of the bodyguards came over and said not to stand so close to the rope. Then there was a commotion behind me, and the bodyguard seemed to reach, ever so briefly, Jason Bourne–like, for something sinister under an armpit. Until he saw it was a five-year-old girl running back to her dad. Obviously, the world chess championship was a prime location for would-be child assassins of technocrat overlords.
I kept watching Thiel and the Scandinavian hustler, wondering at what moment he would offer his business card and ask Thiel for his contact info. He waited too long. Soon, Thiel was approached by the organizers and told that it was time for him to make the ceremonial first move. As he quickly stood up and left the table, the Scandinavian looked heartbroken.
• • •
At two o’clock, the players entered the executioner’s room as photographers took their final images. Liberated from the grind of interminable games, Carlsen seemed energized—he looked menacingly poised and relaxed. Carlsen came out fast. After thirty minutes and twenty moves, he was ahead on the clock by more than ten minutes over Karjakin. Carlsen then continued to impose pressure on Karjakin, and that pressure consumed increasingly more time. Yet after thirty-seven moves over fifty-five minutes, another draw was accepted.
• • •
Ten minutes later the second game began. Both players had removed their jackets. Carlsen, with white pieces, as he had in game five, opened with the Giuoco Piano. Karjakin continued to fall behind on time as Carlsen turned on the pressure and gained material. After forty minutes of play, with less than two minutes of time on his clock, Karjakin was being fitted for a straitjacket on the board. Queens were traded on the thirty-seventh move. As the positions on the board lost complexity, Carlsen relaxed further until he looked like a man on a breezy stroll in the park. Meanwhile Karjakin was down to forty seconds.
A rush of excitement went through the crowd when the computer engines shown on the flat-screens all over the venue determined a mate was available to Carlsen—but it was far too many moves away from his current position. Unfortunately, Carlsen unwittingly eliminated that path by moving his bishop instead of his king. In the last stretch, Carlsen had one last opportunity to mount a lethal attack but moved the wrong bishop on the seventy-third move. As the final seconds on Karjakin’s clock evaporated, with only four seconds left, somehow Karjakin miraculously found the space to make the drawing move. After eighty-four moves, the game ended in a stalemate.
The spectator gallery roared approval. Judit Polgár declared from her commentator’s booth that Carlsen had thrown away the match. Carlsen folded his arms and stared at the board despondently.
• • •
Just before the third game began, as Karjakin adjusted his back-row white pieces, Carlsen released and refolded his arms again, closed his eyes, and proceeded to collapse against his headrest in disgust with himself. I heard gasps around me as if this might signal that the pressure was too overwhelming and that soon, as had happened in the eighth game, he might crack. After the eighth game he’d had nearly a day and a half to recover from the overwhelming disappointment. Here, now, after squandering a commanding position in the previous tie break, he had ten minutes.
Yet just before the arbiter circled the table and triggered the clock’s time into motion, Carlsen opened his eyes and stared at the board, and something new arrived. Those deep-set brown eyes suddenly came alive in a way I hadn’t seen before. He looked angry. But it wasn’t a helpless anger. It was a determined anger. Ruthless even.
In the first few minutes, the pieces danced over the board. The harmony and beauty of their movements seemed more like ballet than like the standard chess metaphor for war. Then Karjakin uncharacteristically went on the attack. Perhaps after living on the edge for so much of the previous game, he was determined to remove the clock factor. Maybe he wanted to pounce on Carlsen’s frustration from the last game and exploit any emotional fragility that lingered with so little time for him to recover from the errors that cost him his victory. Maybe he’d gained the necessary confidence to go for the win from his ability to escape defeat against the world champion. Just as I was watching Karjakin leaning tensely over the table pondering his next move, Judit Polgár’s commentary echoed through the venue: “I want Sergey, if he’s going to be the champion, I want him to crush in one game. You can’t just be playing defensive. Please. If he wants to take the crown, he has to show that he goes for it and attacks Magnus and does it all the way that he wins the game. He beats Magnus. Because until this point, Sergey was defensive and when Magnus lost, it was a mistake of Magnus. It was not the great creative play by Sergey. He was genius in his defense.”
I turned to have a closer look at Carlsen. It’s a lot easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to just look at it. Over the course of the next few minutes, as I watched Carlsen contend with this definitive moment in his career, I became aware that on some level he finally seemed to embrace, rather than look cursed and burdened by, the role he had spent his life carving out for himself in the world. He looked ready to make the role his own.
Instead of using his army of pieces in a methodically coordinated maneuver against his opponent, you could feel real emotion. With the slowly increasing pressure Carlsen relentlessly applied on Karjakin, something profoundly changed for me. There was some kind of metamorphosis where as a spectator, instead of feeling my customary awe at his arresting powers of calculation or grueling levels of concentration, I now felt connected to his heart in a way I’d only experienced with artists. The anger and tension left him and he was no longer just trying to break Karjakin, to cave him in and witness the final gasp of the collapse. He was somewhere else. Far away. Alone. The entire world and everyone who ever played this game could be looking over his shoulder, but Carlsen seemed to remember in these strange moments that he could find the answer before anyone else.
If Karjakin could Houdini his way out of any bolted safe dropped into the river, Carlsen added a new element to the trick: with menacing fluidity, he lit a fire under the tank to bring the water to a slow boil. Karjakin floated over the endless possibilities within each steaming bubble while time ebbed and dwindled away.
After the twenty-second move, Karjakin was on a precarious ledge, driven there by time. Six moves later, with Carlsen bearing down, Karjakin was down to three minutes on his clock.
Karjakin frantically searched for an escape, some means to reverse the script of where the game was heading. He glanced with despair over at his clock and saw Carlsen’s relative eternity of seven minutes remaining versus his own twenty seconds.
In the final moments, as Carlsen had his queen and rook dug into an attacking position well into enemy territory, Karjakin desperately pondered his position one last time and moved a rook. He had thirteen seconds. On the thirty-eighth move, Carlsen briskly slid his rook down to Karjakin’s back row, malevolently poised to steal a bishop and place a bow on the game. As his time ran out Karjakin gazed over the wreckage of a lost battlefield and extended his hand across the board, offering his resignation. Cheers erupted all over the Fulton Market in recognition of the quality of the game.
Karjakin now needed a win to survive, or Carlsen would win the championship.
• • •
Karjakin started with the Sicilian Defense, and the audience sarcastically applauded—finally something besides the Ruy Lopez. Instead of a defensive crouch, Karjakin offered a fighting stance. Carlsen rested his chin in the palm of his hand, and I found myself uncontrollably smiling in the darkness of the viewing tent as time stood still.
With survival looming only on the increment—gaining ten seconds on the clock after each move—Karjakin was forced to risk more than he ever had to stay alive in the match. A draw would no longer work. He needed a win. And to deliver a win, he needed a miracle. Yet as he strove to create, Carlsen’s will resisted any interference toward his objective. The clock bled down and there were whispers around me that Karjakin might be luring Carlsen to go for a win in the hopes of exposing more chances for a mistake. I looked around the venue and spotted a little girl of maybe three alone at a chessboard, so consumed with the board and pieces she’d forgotten about the championship. Carlsen only needed a draw to retain his crown, but it was clear he wanted something more.
As Karjakin’s time eroded to only thirty seconds, he feverishly looked to prolong what the engines and experts were all predicting looked nearly inevitable. Before the forty-ninth move of the sixteenth game of the match, Carlsen took twenty-nine seconds to identify and savor his gift to chess history.
It’s deeply troubling to contemplate how often we fail to recognize the important moments in our lives until much later, when we’re helpless to do anything about them. Yet the worse tragedy might be when we do recognize those moments as they arrive and intuit exactly the precise ways in which they will irrevocably define us to ourselves and shape the rest of our lives. It is here, despite doing our best to seize these moments, that we risk betraying, at the core, how terribly miscast we feel in the roles of our lives while simply attempting to play ourselves.
But Magnus Carlsen recognized the moment and became even more alive and present. As he looked at the board, he saw it. Nobody else did. Not Sergey across the table or Judit Polgár in the commentators’ booth or Henrik Carlsen or any of us who stood on the other side of the glass watching. We had absolutely no idea. But Magnus did. He had fought all his life to earn an indelible moment on the world’s stage, performing for history. After he’d squandered numerous opportunities and nearly lost the match, everything he had worked for, everything he was or ever imagined himself to be, now stood on the precipice, hanging with his title and the horrible consequence of who this curious creature might be in the world without it.
Carlsen slid his rook deep into enemy territory to place Karjakin’s king in check.
Karjakin quickly fled with his king to h7.
Carlsen slid his queen to the h6 square, entrapping and setting up the scaffolding for a king’s execution.
The notation “50.Qh6+!!” deconstructed means this: Carlsen’s queen moved to the h6 square and placed Karjakin’s king in check, illustrated by the plus sign. The exceedingly rare double exclamation marks are awarded not only for a move of sublime majesty on the board but also for the element of unexpectedness in the creation. The closest equivalent I can think of arises in bullfighting, where even the most legendary matadors might go an entire career without facing a bull of such exceeding virtue an audience of thousands wave handkerchiefs to demand a pardon. Before Carlsen’s queen sacrifice to win the crown in New York City, the most famous double exclamation mark awarded for one happened sixty years earlier and two miles away in Greenwich Village, at the Marshall Chess Club, on October 17, 1956. On the seventeenth move, a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer played “Be6!!” against twenty-six-year-old Donald Byrne in “The Game of the Century” and electrified the chess world. Moves worthy of double exclamation marks almost never happen between players competing at the highest levels of the game, yet Carlsen had achieved his with a mind-blowing coda at a world championship against one of the best players on earth.
This was the most magical moment of the match. Chess had always been a forbidden garden behind the eyes of all its greatest composers. For fifteen hundred years they had thrown flowers down a bottomless well. But during those twenty-nine seconds, without the world knowing it, Magnus Carlsen had turned the key and trespassed through a gate to his most private garden in order to gather a bouquet of roses to place on Karjakin’s grave.
Even for a few seconds after it happened, no one saw it. It was that good. That magical. There was a prolonged moment of deafening, paralyzing silence. And then total fucking pandemonium. Children squealed and even casual spectators threw up their hands in disbelief. I watched as those grandmasters and older men and women who had devoted their entire lives to this game struggle to break free from the overwhelming incredulity at what they had just witnessed. They were overcome with anguished beauty.
Karjakin gave one parting glance at the infinite possibilities of chess reduced to only one remaining inescapable outcome: which of Carlsen’s rooks would he hire to assassinate his king?
“50.Qh6+!!” was instantly recognized by aficionados as one of the most riveting codas in the history of the World Chess Championship. Carlsen had warned a reporter at the postgame press conference from a previous game that if they were looking for art, “you will have to look elsewhere.” He proved himself wrong with the most convincing case at the most vital moment offered in all of chess. As long as chess is played, the move will be studied by chess historians. And they will be as helpless as scholars attempting to unriddle the power of the last line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “You must change your life.”
As I made my way through the crowd in the VIP room to get to the press room, I could hear a chorus of “Happy Birthday” being sung to Carlsen.
Then I saw Frank Brady, paralyzed with awe on the couch, staring at the board on a flat-screen TV, his mouth still gaping.
As I approached, he couldn’t break away from the board on the screen.
“How did he find . . . that ?” he gasped. “Gorgeous.”
• • •
On my way home from the championship, to decompress a little, I walked the two and a half miles north to the hustlers’ tables at Washington Square Park to watch some games. There, I overheard a father and his daughter ask one of the players where the Chess Forum was. I followed them over to Thompson Street and looked through the store window as they were greeted by Imad Khachan inside. Then I got lost in the boards on display in the storefront window, a cross-section of nearly two millennia of world history distilled into hundreds of new and antique chess sets, showing the game’s journey across fifteen hundred years and well over a billion players’ lives, irrespective of culture or creed: boards based on King Arthur, on Nigerian village life hand-carved from scraps of wood, the Vatican warring against mercenaries, China’s Qing dynasty defending its territory, the Crusades attempts to annex the Holy Land, hand-painted pieces of Columbus’s crew staring down Native Americans, American and British troops from the American War of Independence standing guard, the bluecoats and grays of the American Civil War doing battle over slavery, boards based on the battle of Pearl Harbor and other epic contests of World War II.
And then history had brought the horrors of 9/11 to the Chess Forum’s door. Bobby Fischer was fifty-eight and cheering on the devastation from Japan. Magnus Carlsen was ten years old and likely in his bedroom in Norway practicing. Donald Trump was in his New York penthouse calling into a local TV station and boasting that one of his buildings near the site was once again the tallest in downtown. Now it was fifteen years later and Bobby Fischer was dead and Donald Trump was president and Magnus Carlsen was champion of the world.
As I stood there on Thompson Street, I thought about the three questions my editor had wanted me to investigate. The first—why isn’t Magnus Carlsen more of a household name?—I could have answered without the benefit of the last three weeks. As a rule, our track record with appreciating genius in its own time has proved very limited. Galileo. Van Gogh. Kafka. Poe. Dickinson. But this is itself the answer to the second question: What is the secret to Carlsen’s greatness?
I don’t pretend to suggest the art communicated from sixty-four squares of an ancient board game meaningfully translates with any of the scope or immediacy of music, paint on a canvas, or words on a page. But that is precisely the point. It is very likely that Magnus Carlsen brings as rare a talent to his craft as Beethoven or Van Gogh brought to theirs, and he approaches his craft with equal devotion despite how inaccessible that craft remains to the world. That is the secret to his greatness: that it remains a secret.
Then there was the final question, the one that I had become most preoccupied with over the course of the assignment: Will Magnus Carlsen be able to avoid the unhinged fate of Fischer and Paul Morphy and Peter Winston and so many others?
And at that moment, I remembered another time I had been standing on a street corner. It was years ago, outside the Plaza de Toros de las Ventas in Madrid. I had never seen a bullfight before and wasn’t sure I even wanted to. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go inside. So I asked a group of aficionados standing outside the front entrance what separated the greatest matadors in Spain listed on a nearby poster. They offered the names and motioned with their hands to indicate how close the various matadors allowed the horn to pass to the matadors’ hearts with each charge.
But they left out one name on the list: José Tomás.
“Him?” I asked, pointing at Tomás’s name. “How close does he let the horn come?”
They all looked embarrassed before one explained, sheepishly, that Spain had never seen its greatest living genius perform his most sublime works of art. The horn came too close. Nobody watching could look through their hands. Even men who worshiped the dark beauty of the corrida were simply too afraid to peek.
No great matador was ever considered so without coming within an inch of his life from a goring and then returning with renewed willingness to risk it all again. If he couldn’t come back, he couldn’t be taken seriously as great. So it should be with all great artists. They are burdened with the expectation of accepting more danger than inferior practitioners, of allowing the horn ever closer to their hearts.
And if they fail? If they are fatally gored? The popular narrative is that winners show their character and strength in finding a way to win, while losers are weak and lack the necessary mettle. Yet winning is a single note—pure in tone but alone. It’s the losers who are confronted with who they really are and find depth and perspective as a direct consequence of failure. They take us far closer to human truths when we hear their stories compared to those of their vanquishers. Winners are rarely self-aware. Losers have no choice. The fundamental, irrevocable lesson of life and nature is loss. Winning is a temporal illusion.
What would Fischer have been without madness? What will Carlsen be? A personality grows—or doesn’t grow—before some feeling of worthlessness. It is a hole that is never filled. A breeze always comes out of it. The two standard responses of life tend either to be in succumbing to it or overcompensating. Nothing can wipe away that essential void, but for a time, perhaps, it can be occupied by something else and the world can be overcome, its towers falling in silence, its pieces erased from the square.
All these quests are in the end the issues of children. Underneath springs an innocent yet awesome desire to conquer all, an unchecked power. Only a child would dream of becoming world heavyweight champion, of becoming president, ruling the world, or the world in miniature, conquering a chessboard, devoting a life to a game so few truly understand.
What that power has developed around it is a defense mechanism. Against growing up. Against time. And I suppose here is where the whole issue dovetails not just with art but with all human achievement. A well-balanced adult, as the model is presented to us, should never attempt these things. The gamble is too great, the risk too enormous, the failure too final. Because to lose . . . to lose turns it all into nothing but a lesson, a transient thing in a transient world. Perhaps that is why, even when we don’t understand, we celebrate above all others those who dare to take that risk.