‘Time to say Dubai,’ tweeted Magnus Carlsen, like some wry Bond villain, when he learned that the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi would be his next challenger for the world championship title. Hosted at the Dubai Expo, battle will commence on Friday 26 November.
Carlsen wrested the title from Viswanathan Anand in 2013, and since then has defended his title against Anand (again), Sergey Karjakin and Fabiano Caruana. But the Norwegian downplayed his match experience in appraising his prospects against the new challenger: ‘My biggest advantage is that I am better at chess.’ Still, world championship matches have an intensity all of their own, in which nerves and stamina are as indispensable as good moves. The match runs until mid-December, lasting for 14 classical games, with a possible rapid tie-break.
The Inner Game by Dominic Lawson (first published in 1993, republished this month by Silvertail books) is about the 1993 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short.
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