Cheating, groupies, big money and drunken brawls: how chess went rock n’roll

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Chess’s fusty image has been shaken by recent allegations of underhand tactics. But as any fan or player can tell you, it has long been younger, hipper – and wilder – than most outsiders realised

Cramling is probably now better known than her mother, Pia, a grandmaster who has been one of the top female players for nearly 40 years. “She was really known during her time,” Cramling says of her mother. “But now there’s a new way of being known in chess, and it doesn’t mean you have to be the best in the world. It’s a sign of the times.”Photograph: Miguel Pereira/Getty Images

There has been plenty of other drama off the board too: grandmasters regularly sniping at each other on social media, players falling out over rogue chess moderators, or even, in Dutch grandmaster Anish Giri’s case, having their private messages hacked and leaked. Last year a video emerged of Nakamura, Eric Hansen, after a drunken blitz game turned sour, watched on by other bemused players.

“It shows how stressful the game is,” she adds. “Sometimes afterwards, a player can’t fall asleep the entire night because they keep replaying moves in their head.”There is sometimes a darker side too. In 2020, Botez warned it was still common for male players to use their age and position to go on the “hunt” for women and girls. “It has been going on for so long and no one blinks an eye,” she said. “The extent to which people never say anything and find things OK is pretty spooky.

“People forget chess is also a sublimation of war and a ritual encounter with death,” he adds. “Because in effect, your life’s on the line. So the stakes are high. People feel it.” “His over-the-board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I only think a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective.”

 

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