What’s a win sandwich? As far as I know, I’ve just made up the term (and don’t feel like having Google inform me that 6,385 people have already used it), which I’ll define thus: player 1 wins, then player 2 wins, then player 1 wins again. (Intervening draws don’t count.) Simple. Now, why is it interesting? In most cases it shouldn’t be especially interesting, but in the context of world championship matches it has become a rarity.
In 2021, Magnus Carlsen was the only player to win games (against Ian Nepomniachtchi), so there was no sandwich. (Not even an open-faced sandwich!)
In 2018 both Carlsen and the challenger, Fabiano Caruana, “forgot” to win any games until the tiebreaker (an “air sandwich”?), and then Carlsen shut him out 3-0 in the tiebreaker.
In 2016 Sergey Karjakin won first, then Carlsen, and then Carlsen won two tiebreak games.
Only in 2014, during the Carlsen era, has there been a proper win sandwich: Carlsen won game 2, Viswanathan Anand won game 3, and then Carlsen won game 6 (and 11).
In 2013, Carlsen won three games, Anand none.
In 2012, Anand beat Boris Gelfand: no sandwich. Gelfand won first, Anand struck back, and in the tiebreak Anand won one more game on the way to match victory.
In 2010, both Anand and Veselin Topalov had “sandwiches”.
In 2008, Anand’s win over Vladimir Kramnik was sandwich-free: Anand won games 3, 5, and 6 before Kramnik won game 10.
Before that there’s the 2007 World Championship tournament in Mexico City and the 2006 reunification match between Kramnik and Topalov (which featured sandwiches by both sides), and before that we have split titles going back to 1993 (inclusive).
So in nine matches, only three have had “sandwiches”. Why is that? In two or three cases, it’s because the match was one-sided: Carlsen-Nepo and Carlsen-Anand 1 were whitewashes, while Anand-Kramnik was close to it. On other occasions the matches were very close and the players scared of taking risks: Carlsen-Caruana, Carlsen-Karjakin, and Anand-Gelfand fit that bill.
What was needed, then, was a match between players who were closely matched (or at least both in reasonably good form - or were perhaps both in iffy form?) and who were willing to take meaningful risks. That was certainly the case in both of Topalov’s matches (vs. Kramnik and Anand), and to some extent in Carlsen-Anand II. (Like the Anand-Kramnik match, it finished with a 3-1 score in decisive games, but unlike that match it was competitive to the end. Anand had the advantage for a while in the last game of that match; had he won it (not that he had a decisive advantage at any point) he would have equalized the scores.
So now we turn at last to the Ian Nepomniachtchi vs. Ding Liren match. The first two games looked great for Nepo: a draw with some winning chances in game 1, and a crushing victory in game 2. In some matches such a start would suggest that a rout was on the way, but not this time. After a very easy draw with Black in game 3, Ding won in great style in game 4. Yes, from a computer standpoint Nepo lost the game in one move, but it was an unpleasant position and he had been under pressure for a long time. Humans - even those at the top of the chess food chain - lose such positions all the time. Now those thinking back to Nepo’s collapse after losing game 6 to Carlsen in 2021 might have worried that we might be in for a repeat performance. (I’ll admit that the concern crossed my mind more than once, even if Ding isn’t the juggernaut that Carlsen is.)
If so, fear not: Nepo has learned something from 2021. He came back from the rest day, and this time he won a nice game. He returned to 1.e4 and the Ruy Lopez, deviating from game 1 with the common 6.d3 rather than the delayed & deferred exchange on c6. (There needs to be a variation where White doesn’t take and Black doesn’t reply with …b5, so we can have the Procrastinated Delayed and Deferred Variation of the Ruy Lopez. It would become the instant favorite line for those chess players who…eh, I’ll finish this joke later. Maybe tomorrow.) Back to the game: Nepo-Ding followed a Firouzja-Giri game from last August, with Nepomniachtchi varying with a novelty on move 12. Both players seemed to know what they were doing (whether by prep, their own high skill level, or a combination thereof) through at least White’s 19th move.
In my view, Ding started to go wrong with 19…Bd8, looking to activate the bishop with …Bb6. There’s nothing wrong with this, objectively, and the “official” losing move didn’t come until 35…Rc8(?). Practically, though, it made his life more difficult. 19…Bd8 may have been good for Ding’s bishop, but it wasn’t good for his king, and after 22…Bb6 (mission accomplished) 23.h4 Nepo’s attacking play commenced. Neither side played perfectly over the next dozen moves or so, but the trend was always clear: mistakes by Ding would endanger his king’s well-being, while mistakes by Nepo would only give Ding chances to survive. After 36.Re4! and 37.g5!! White was winning, and while Ding did well to get the queens off without losing material, his king and kingside were still too weak to survive. (The game, with my annotations, is here.)
Nepo thus leads the best-of-14 game match 3-2, with Ding having the white pieces for tomorrow’s (Sunday’s) game 6. Monday will be a rest day, Nepo will have White in game 7, and then there will be another rest day followed by back-to-back games again, but then it will be Ding who starts each pair with White. Will he have the psychological strength to fight for a win tomorrow (assuming of course that he can get an interesting position out of the opening), or will he need to lick his wounds? For now, I’m just glad that Nepomniachtchi was able to bounce back, and so it’s unlikely that we’ll see a repeat of the 2021 disaster.
*The subtitle is an allusion to the omnivorous Homer Simpson.
Going further back in time - before the split title, thus 1980s including 1990 - Kasparov and Karpov were big sandwich lovers. Also in different versions, two or even three wins for one player before the other one came back in the match. It happened in all of their matches but the first one - which had been abandoned after five wins for Karpov, then three wins for Kasparov (and 40 draws in 48 games).
These were also closely matched players (Kasparov never dominated in these WCh matches) with different styles. Of course longer matches had different dynamics, they also tended to include short draws and nobody complained at the time - at least not on the Internet.