Carlsen Out
Nepomniachtchi and Ding will play for the World Championship.
Maybe July 20 wasn’t the official deadline, but it turned out to be The Day anyway. Magnus Carlsen decided that he has had enough of World Championship matches for the time being, and so Candidates winner Ian Nepomniachtchi and Candidates runner-up Ding Liren will play for the title.
Carlsen emphasized that he is not giving up the game, or even forswearing the possibility of playing for the title in the future. But for now, we get a match between the guy Carlsen clobbered a few months ago and the guy who needed four quasi-miracles to have this chance. (The quasi-miracles: Sergey Karjakin’s getting himself banned, the barely legal Chinese tournaments allowing Ding to qualify for the Candidates, Hikaru Nakamura’s losing a very drawish ending in the last round of the Candidates, and then of course Carlsen’s deciding not to play. With the kind of luck Ding is enjoying, Nepo’s wife, if he has one, might want to take out a large insurance policy on him. [Note that in saying all of this, I’m not denying his excellence as a chess player. While we’d all laugh at the implausibility of a Hollywood movie employing all the dei ex machina Ding needed to reach this point, his being the world’s #2 player is not a matter of good luck.])
Too bad for the chess world, both from within and for its ability to drawn in new fans. But maybe Carlsen will be a trailblazer. In the NBA, perhaps the Golden State Warriors will collectively say, “Gee, the playoff season is long and exhausting. From now on, we’re going to try to maximize the number of games we win in the regular season, and then maybe play some Drew League games instead of participating in the playoffs.” Or in tennis, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Roger Federer decide to forsake the Slams, preferring to rest to save their strength for shorter events. (The race for #1 is what it’s all about; no one cares about who wins the most Grand Slam tournaments, right?) Or if Tom Brady decides to skip out on the playoffs: “I’ve won enough Super Bowls; for now, I want to keep playing so I can set regular season records. Good luck to my teammates in the post-season!”
Too cynical? Maybe. And maybe, as Alireza Firouzja and other talented teens work their way to the top, Carlsen will get interested again. I hope so, for the sake of the up-and-comers, so that when their time comes there won’t be a large segment of the chess world saying, “Yeah, but you’re not the real champ; you never had to beat Carlsen.” Anatoly Karpov had that hanging over his head for years, and so too did Garry Kasparov, though to a lesser degree.
So, what do you think? Does Carlsen have any obligations to the chess world, as not only the #1 player but as the World Champion? FIDE clearly believes that top players have obligations of some sort, or Karjakin wouldn’t have been banned from the Candidates. Carlsen’s abdication isn’t a case of moral turpitude, but is that enough of a justification for the degradation of the championship title? On the other hand, do we want to be Jesse Cardiff?
Carlsen may have the right not to defend his title (certainly he is not legally or contractually obliged to do so), but I do think that he, in his role as world chess champion, has an obligation to the chess world nonetheless. It is a real shame that he is unwilling to defend his title, tiring and taxing though it may be for him. It diminishes the title, I think, when, first, the reigning champion doesn't value it enough to defend it and when, second, the undisputed champion and number one player is not part of it.
I think Carlsen has no obligation at all to the chess world, and I think he has the full right to not defend his title.
If, but just as an exercise, I had to imagine some kind of (maybe, moral) obligation, I would say to Nepo.