John Saunders’ Chess Blog: Carlsen-Caruana 2018: Through a Glass Darkly

Game 1: the challenger Fabiano Caruana faces the champion Magnus Carlsen

The first thing to say is that I’m not intending to provide detailed coverage of the actual play. This is already being done excellently and professionally by the likes of Chess.com (now working in tandem with ChessBomb), Chess24.com, ChessBase.com, etc, and there would be no point in trying to compete with all these online chess outlets. Click on the links if that is what you are looking for.

What I’m looking to do here is provide a bit of colour and give a general picture of the event. As someone who edited major national chess magazines for 13 years between 1999 and 2012, and who still regularly covers big-time chess competitions such as the Gibraltar, Isle of Man and London Classic tournaments, I am naturally interested in the whole business of chess event coverage and how it has developed since the turn of the century.

VERDICT ON THE VENUE: IT’S AWFUL…

Did I write ‘provide a bit of colour’? Oh dear – precious little colour to be found at the venue, I’m afraid. It’s called, somewhat cryptically, The College, and is located in Southampton Row in Central London. It used to be Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design but the college people moved elsewhere some time ago, since when their former building has been rented out and not acquired another permanent function. I daresay it could be tarted up to suit various purposes, such as exhibitions, assuming organisers applied a reasonable amount of imagination and put adequate resource into it, but what we have here is a complete dud. As presented by the organisers, WorldChess, the building is about as friendly and welcoming as the Lubyanka in Moscow and totally unsuited to the purpose to which it is being put.

I was tempted to title this piece ‘The Rooky Horror Show‘ but I think I already coined that pun last year to describe GingerGM‘s Crypt Blitz Tournament, held in the crypt of a London church last year…

— John Saunders (@johnchess) November 19, 2017

… and which was a lot of fun, but I never imagined a world championship match being played anywhere similarly dark and forbidding. For the title I also toyed with ‘The Lubyanka Experience‘ as the venue arguably gives you a taste of old Soviet Russia. I’m only half-joking about this as the set-up of this tournament has its roots in Soviet culture – overcrowding, dim lights, queues for everything and burly security men watching your every move.

One comes away with the impression that WorldChess’s priority was to give the match a central London location at the cheapest price possible, catering for the needs of VIPs, players, online spectators, onsite spectators and media in that order, with the last two groups being given only the smallest regard. Other considerations, e.g. the popularisation of chess in the host country and the wider world, the involvement of players and chess enthusiasts in the event… have received no attention whatsoever.

In a nutshell, the venue is gloomy, depressing and overcrowded. But don’t take my word for it, here are some pictures I took…

THE LUBYANKA EXPERIENCE…

“You are now entering the Lubyanka“: the above photo is the first thing you see once you are into the building and a security man has checked your bag. He’ll ask you: “have you got anything sharp in your bag?” I wish I had been as witty as an esteemed photographer friend of mine had been when he replied “only my lenses.“

“You’re in a dimly-lit corridor. You have a coloured wristband and a mobile phone in a plastic bag. Click R to turn right or L to turn left.”

“You clicked R (right). Make sure the wristband is visible to the security guard as he will demand to see it. So will all the other security guards positioned along the corridor, on the way to the commentary room.” This will happen every few metres of your movements along corridors for the next seven hours or however long Magnus Carlsen tries to win a dead level endgame. Another photographer friend of mine said he was going to wear his wristband round his head in future to save having to hitch his sleeve up every few seconds as he was walking round.

“You clicked L (left). Another gloomy corridor leading to the cafe and, eventually, the auditorium. Remember to keep your wristband visible at all times.” The cafe is crowded but the food is pretty good, if a bit overpriced (but that’s London for you). The auditorium is, of course, tiny…

“You’re in the auditorium – a small room seating around 200, not very comfortably, from where you can peer through a glass screen at two men playing chess.” You might think that this is the main point of the exercise but quite soon you get bored sat staring at two blokes in suits who make moves very infrequently, so let’s retrace our steps to the entrance foyer…

“You are looking up a winding staircase. A burly security guard will prevent you from going up there as you have the wrong colour wristband. For all you know, there may be champagne, caviar and dancing girls up there – or it could just be an empty space – but since you are only on Level 1 of this game, you’re not going to find out anytime soon. Sorry.” As a humble photo-journalist I’m only on Level 1 of the game myself so cannot enlighten you as to what happens up there. You could try bribing the guard but don’t come crying to me if you end up in the gulag. Let’s go back along the right-hand corridor for a bit…

“You have reached the commentary room. Good luck trying to get in there.” There seemed to be a bit of a hassle gaining admission to the commentary room on the first Saturday but if you’re patient, you’ll manage it. Remember, queuing up for things is an authentic Soviet experience, courtesy of ex-president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, so you may as well enjoy it. Actually, to be fair, it’s also an authentic part of life in London, so, hey…

“You’re still in the commentary room…” And that’s Woody Harrelson, the Hollywood/TV actor. Woody tried to liven things up at the start of the match by fumbling with the pieces. (I might do a little skit on that later.) Sadly, your bottom is getting sore on that unyielding wooden box with no back rest, so it’s time to move on…

“You’ve got a green wristband which means you’re a chess journalist. Bad luck! Lose at least half the income you would receive if you had normal, sensible employment. OK, it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. And you have the inestimable privilege of entering the media room. Hmm… not that great a privilege, if truth be told. It’s overcrowded. You’ve no chance finding desk space and a chair to sit on.” 

“You’re in the even darker, more cluttered end of the press room.” There’s tea, coffee and some tasty snacks available there so not all bad – but it’s really horribly overcrowded.

Example of WorldChess merchandise: a shopping bag with their controversial
x-certificate logo on it. Just the thing for your grocery shopping – or perhaps not.

So the difference comes down to location, location location. The Olympia Conference Centre in West London, where the Classic is held, is fit for purpose, whereas The College/Lubyanka simply isn’t. Putting this match in such an unsuitable place might look like a massive blunder on the part of the organisers but I fear it is worse than that. It was not so much a blunder as a deliberate move demonstrating that WorldChess simply didn’t care what the paying public and outside media think of their event. That’s another familiar flavour of the old Soviet Union as regards the organisation of chess. It’s happened here before: a few years ago they put on a FIDE Grand Prix event in London to which the public wasn’t admitted at all. I didn’t attend the 2016 world championship in New York but I have chatted about it with those who did and they were highly critical of the arrangements there too.

Notice that I have referred to the organisers as WorldChess rather than FIDE. The point is that WorldChess (part of Agon Ltd) is the entity to which FIDE outsourced the organisation of the world championship, but the arrangements for this match were of course put in place by the outgoing FIDE administration. The new FIDE administration will argue that it was too late to do anything about this as they’ve barely had time to get their feet under the table before the world championship match was upon them. Fair enough, but the chess world is going to be watching them like hawks from now on to see if they can effect a radical change in their approach to such major events.

Though I don’t doubt that a successful world championship event could be mounted in London if it were carefully planned, I do wonder whether major international cities really make the best venues for big chess matches. I feel slightly disloyal writing this as a London resident but I am in two minds about the place. I love it and hate it in almost equal measure. I live in the suburbs and rarely venture into the central part of town as it is choked with tourists, very expensive and just generally wearisome for a man of my advancing years. Putting a chess competition into the middle of it, however exalted and important the event might seem to us chess people, means absolutely nothing to London and garners next to no publicity. I guess the same was true of New York in 2016. Compare and contrast Reykjavik and Baguio City, whose very names still evoke the chess matches played there many years ago, probably as much to their non-playing residents as to us chess obsessives. Wouldn’t it be better to locate world chess championships somewhere where they will make a difference or be better appreciated by the residents? No, I don’t mean Khanty-Mansiysk in the middle of Siberia: but maybe another city in Britain or elsewhere in western Europe. My vote would go to Manchester, a city which was promised a world championship match in the 1990s but had it cruelly snatched away. I’ve been to Manchester a few times in recent years and found it a really agreeable city. They have an excellent transport system, an airport and, significantly, a large proportion of the BBC’s television service which has decamped there from London, maybe giving a better chance of getting chess on national TV there. Just a thought…