Before the suspension of the candidates tournament in Yekaterinenburg, at the halfway mark after seven rounds, I sometimes thought of the 1978 Indian film The Chess Players, which is set in the nineteenth century. Two Indian noblemen love chess so much that they don’t pay attention to anything else. War comes, the British take their kingdom, the wife of one of them starts an extramarital affair, a house collapses, but nothing takes them away from their game.
Perhaps this was the way the outside world saw the chess players who continued playing while the rest of the world was locked down, although the candidates were not as oblivious to the outside world as those Indian nobles. In addition to Teimour Radjabov, who had withdrawn before the tournament had started, several players had voiced their opinion that the tournament should not be played at this time.
Maybe they were not really afraid that they would catch the corona virus. You might say that with regular health checks and playing in a city that at least officially was still almost untouched by the pandemic, they were among the best protected in the world.
But the atmosphere may have been eerie. Ian Nepomniachtchi had a cold. Was it really a common cold or the dreaded virus? If the latter, it had been decided at the start that the tournament would be immediately stopped and indefinitely postponed.
It might be difficult to concentrate under these circumstances, though Magnus Carlsen, speaking from Norway, had a firm view: you go and do the job, for that’s your job. But then the Russian government announced a ban on international flights to and from Russia, starting the next day. This convinced FIDE that the game was up. The five non-Russian players had to pack their luggage in a hurry to get home.
A disappointed chess fan wrote, “Why don’t they just play on and stay in Yekaterinburg? It’s safer there than elsewhere in the world.” That may have been true, but it wasn’t relevant anymore. Anish Giri and his second Erwin l’Ami immediately booked a flight to Moscow with a connection to Amsterdam and others soon followed, with Amsterdam as the intended destination, on a plane that was chartered by FIDE-president Arkady Dvorkovich.
Zhaoqin Peng, who came from China to the Netherlands in 1995 and won the Dutch women’s championship fourteen times, was at the candidates from the start to provide commentary in Chinese for the FIDE website, together with Hou Yifan.
At some point Peng was informed that her broadcast had been followed by a million people. I was impressed. This is what you do it for! But then I wondered. Is it really a spectacular number, less than 1 in 1000 Chinese? What were the others doing? Maybe they played xiangqi, the Chinese form of chess that is still more popular there than ours.
At the opening ceremony, there were speeches by the governor of the Sverdlovsk region, by Dvorkovich and by Karpov. The eight candidates were excused and not present. Maybe the protection of their health was considered more important than that of the dignitaries.
Among the audience of about a thousand people, Peng and Hou Yifan were the only ones with masks. They were looked at strangely. But the amazement was reciprocal. On the Dutch website Schaaksite.nl, Peng wrote that the locals from Yekaterinenburg seemed to live in the fictitious paradise Xanadu and had never felt the rolling waves in the world. “May the people here not have to change this healthy and stable situation!”
But the situation did change; a day later, the staff in her hotel was also wearing masks and the tournament organization had to severely tighten the rules for “social distance” on order of the regional government.
On Schaaksite, Peng describes her flight back to the Netherlands on Thursday March 26, the day the tournament was cancelled. She was in a small group with Fabiano Caruana, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Jeroen van den Berg, the director of the Tata Steel tournament who, in Yekaterinenburg, had served as chairman of the Appeals Committee, Lennart Ootes, a Dutch chess photographer and web designer and the Spanish journalist Leontxo Garcia, a veteran reporter of countless tournaments.
Garcia had come to Yekaterinenburg from Spain and had been quarantined upon his arrival. Two days before his quarantine would expire, he had to leave the country without ever having seen the tournament hall. According to Peng, he always kept his good spirits.
The flight to the Netherlands was long delayed, apparently because it had not been easy to secure landing rights, but finally at 5 a.m. their plane, a luxury jet with only twelve seats, took off. Photo’s taken in the plane show the group happily smiling. Don’t worry about the absence of face masks, wrote Peng, as everyone had been checked daily. She went on: “And even if they have infected each other it is no problem, because they are together they must trust and support each other.” I wonder if this saintly attitude may be a remnant of her Chinese upbringing.
The plane landed at Rotterdam airport, where a big car stood ready to bring them to Amsterdam. Peng concludes: “I enjoyed my work in Yekaterinenburg and do not regret such an adventure. I’ll accept the challenge again if it will come the next time.”
In the seventh round, Vachier-Lagrave had beaten Nepomniachtchi in a textbook example of how to handle the French Winawer as White. This made him share the lead with Nepo when the tournament was suspended.
The spectacular game in the viewer shows another aspect of his strength: meticulous preparation. He had already seen almost the whole game at home on his screen.
Click here to view Alekseenko - Vachier-Lagrave, Yekaterinenbug 2020