Their battlefield is a square of 64 black and white squares.
Friday begins in Dubai the world chess championship which pits the defending champion, the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, against his challenger, the Russian Ian Nepomniatchtchi.
In preview Almira Skripchenko, six-time French chess champion and professional poker player in her spare time, official commentator of the match alongside Indian legend Viswanathan Anand, delivered to
Figaro
the keys to this high-stakes game. chessmen than political ones.
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For the Franco-Moldovan chess star, who has just released the introductory manual for a good
start to chess
at Larousse
, the Carlsen-Nepomniatchchi match will not only pit two players with diametrically opposed styles against each other, a Scandinavian hyper-strategist against a tactician bubbling Russian seemingly out of a Dostoyevsky novel, but will also be a kind of reminiscence of the ideological struggles of the Spassky-Fischer matches or later Karpov-Kasparov: “
Nepomniatchtchi is supported by Vladimir Putin and all the Russian people. Carlsen may be the favorite on paper but Ian is bubbling, brash and not to be neglected has a positive score against the world champion. From a psychological point of view, this is not a negligible factor.
"
Read also Garry Kasparov: "This is why Putin spies and paralyzes young people"
Indeed, to bring back “
the crown to the empire
”, as underlined with a very symbolic metaphor Almira Skripchenko, seems to be an obsession of the Russian power which considers that the king of the games is a patriotic cause since the great master Mikhail Botvinnik, a staunch Communist, brought the world scepter back to Moscow in 1948, during the Stalinist era.
Supported by a whole people, Ian Nepomniachtchi will he be able to dominate a Magnus Carlsen who has shown for more than a decade an undivided supremacy over the world of chess. For Almira Skripchenko, the key lies in the ability of the Russian challenger to dominate his nerves: “
Ian is seething. He is a cultured person who reminds me of Renaissance players. He's like a “mad lady” if you allow me that comparison. If he knows how to contain his impulsiveness, he will unleash his talent. This is the sine qua non for bringing the crown back to Russia.
»Beginning of the response on November 26th. The two champions will have fourteen games to see who is the best player in the world.
Le
Figaro Live will
comment on the first part of the match from 3:30 p.m. on November 26.
You can follow Almira Skripchenko's comments, in English, on the Fide website.
Finally, the excellent Chess24 site will provide, in the language of Molière, the analyzes of the great international masters Yannick Gozzoli and Adrien Demuth.
Interview with Almira Skripchenko at
Figaro Live
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