At each tournament, the same ritual.
When she takes her place at her table, facing her opponent of the day, Marie Sebag plunges her steel blue gaze into the chessboard on either side of which the pieces are arranged, along the first two rows.
Like the heroine of the hit Netflix series, "The Queen's Gambit", the best French player rests her head in the palm of her hands, folding her vision on the 64 boxes lined up in front of it.
Now hermetic to its environment, deaf to the whispers that its offensives will arouse in the public, it enters its bubble.
Whether her competitor gets up loudly, drinks water frantically, or snaps her gum, she doesn't care.
In his inner world, silence is essential.
If her heart is racing, the reigning European vice-champion shows nothing of the adrenaline that makes her blood boil.
In chess, it is essential to display an impassive face, emptied of all emotion, in order to leave no hold to his rival.
In "The Lady's Game" on Netflix, Anya Taylor-Joy plays an American chess prodigy. / Netflix / Phil Bray / Netflix 2020
As she prepares to start the clock, Marie, a 34-year-old licensee from the Bischwiller club (Bas-Rhin), already knows what she will play.
She has the first ten to fifteen moves in mind.
With white, if the draw was favorable to him (it is always this color that starts the game), and especially with black.
Like the American Bobby Fischer or the champion of Russian origin Garry Kasparov, who marked the history of this cerebral sport, she swears by "the Sicilian defense".
A great classic.
With a predilection for the Najdorf variant, named after the player who popularized it, "because it is a solid opening, which allows you to take the initiative", she justifies in a vocabulary already almost reserved for the initiated .
A dizzying number of possible scenarios
If the goal of the game is simple - to win, by attacking the opposing king until he can no longer defend himself - the strategy is complex.
Judge instead: whoever inherits white has twenty possibilities to start the game, even if a number of them do not really make sense.
To answer it, black in turn has a range of twenty options.
Or, for the first shot alone, a scenario with 400 variables (20 x 20).
In the next round, the number of possible combinations climbs to 160,000, and this total increases exponentially with each move.
The mathematician Claude Shannon thus calculated, in 1949, that at a rate of thirty moves on average to reach the fatal "mate", the failures could be declined in 10 power 120 different parts, that is to say a 1 followed by… 120 zeros!
This extraordinary result, called the “Shannon number”, is greater than the quantity of atoms in the observable universe, estimated at one 1 followed by 80 zeros.
Or the algorithm that gave birth to Google: a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Chess creeps into players' sleep
Vertiginous!
Fascinating, above all.
“It's a super rich game, you never get bored,” enthuses Sophie Milliet, 60th player in the world.
So, of course, her brain - like that of Marie Sebag, the 34th player in the world, or Nino Maisuradze, who learned to play at the age of 3 in Tbilisi, Georgia - quickly boils.
Labeled "prodigy" from her earliest childhood, the latter remembers spending hours studying the same position on the chessboard, in the hope of finding a loophole and, thus, to conclude the game.
Gained by fatigue, she needed to get out of the game to take a step back and approach the problem from another angle.
"I would then lie down
on the
floor
and, like in
The Lady's Game
, I stared at the ceiling to analyze the situation virtually," she explains.
I thus found different strategies.
A habit that the Latvian Alexei Shirov and the Ukrainian Vassili Ivantchouk have kept: in tournaments, they also sometimes drop off the board to think.
When she finds herself in difficulty, Marie Sebag prefers to get up to decompress and "look for new ideas".
At 38, Nino now has fun playing blind, eyes closed or blindfolded.
Her opponent tells her his blows so that she can imagine the situation.
“I can play up to four games at the same time,” she swears.
I visualize the board mentally and I memorize the position, there are a lot of movements.
It is a stimulating exercise.
"
Nino Maisuradze has been able to play blindfolded (above) and has been handling coins since he was 3 years old./Nino Maisuradze
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Stimulating.
Heady.
Even haunting.
“It takes up a lot of time and space in our lives,” admits Sophie, 37, who spends hours studying the games of the greatest players on her computer.
At the moment, she is analyzing those of the Russian Anatoli Karpov, a past master in the art of countering the attacks of his opponents.
“There is an addictive side, because it's a passion.
If I don't touch a chessboard for a while, I might miss it.
I also avoid playing online, as I have trouble stopping.
"
Chess creeps in everywhere, even in the sleep of the players.
A game lost, and it is the brain which switches to automatic mode: all night long, it rehashes the movements of the pieces, tracking down "the small error" which reversed the game in favor of the opponent.
“I can't sleep,” says Silvia Alexieva, 46, a professional player of Bulgarian origin.
I can only calm myself down once I find the loophole.
This difficulty in disconnecting ended up wearing Claire Gervais: after becoming the youngest champion of France at the age of 16, in 1992, the Normande decided to give up everything nine years later.
"It devoured me," she explains today.
It is a solitary and abstract game, which isolates.
I was struggling to come back to life.
I was not aware of it at the time, but I put myself in danger socially.
»Deprived of film outings and club trips with girlfriends, which are the salt of youth, she sacrificed her childhood and adolescence to chess.
Paid 650 euros per game with her club in Lyon, she was already earning a living at 17.
Played instinctively, until the day when, losing confidence, she "blocked".
“I was afraid to take the initiative, I tried to calculate the strokes, to set up combinations, but it was not my style anymore.
It crippled me.
"
A varied repertoire, memory, intuition ...
Now converted into personal development, Claire Gervais “hardly ever” approaches a chessboard.
"It's a very harsh, macho environment, populated by unbalanced people with oversized egos," she asserts.
This temptation of rejection, Nino Maisuradze also felt it at the end of adolescence.
“I was training seven to eight hours a day,” she recalls.
My life was chess, chess, chess… I had no time for myself and I was singled out at school, so I decided to quit while I was studying at university. law.
"
But at 21, when she left Georgia to settle in France, the pleasure of the game returned.
One tournament calls for another, and finally, she puts her finger on the line.
Join the national team.
“I can't imagine my life without chess anymore,” she says.
I like everything: tactics, strategy, psychology, self-criticism, creativity!
And the commitment.
Marie Sebag, who concedes “fluctuating motivation”, knows that to stay at a high level, you have to constantly work.
If, this year, she takes a break to give priority to her master's 2 in cognitive psychology, she is trying to prepare for the major deadlines.
His bedside books: My 60 Best Parts, by Bobby Fischer, and The Trial of Time, by Garry Kasparov.
Marie Sebag sometimes concedes "a fluctuating motivation" to play chess. / LP / Frédéric Dugit
"It happened to me to rely on my achievements, but there was no miracle, my results were less good", she observes.
So, for the European Championship played in 2019 in Turkey, in Antalya, she repeated her ranges on the computer.
Alone in her hotel room, she replayed her games every evening for two weeks, before analyzing her opponent's game for the next round.
“Sometimes, we don't find its fragility and, there, it's a bit scary, she notes.
We wonder how we will be able to surprise.
Better to have a varied repertoire!
As well as excellent memory, intuition, and good projection skills - from five to ten moves, depending on position.
Chess, or that little bike in your head that spins and spins again.
Never in a vacuum.