BOOK EXCERPT: Checkmate: Scandal, cheating and the billion-dollar rise of chess

In a world where the strongest minds collide across a chequered battlefield, Magnus Carlsen has emerged as the undisputed kingpin, enjoying a 12-year uninterrupted reign as the highest-ranked chess player on earth. But when Carlsen suffers an abrupt defeat at the hands of the audacious and brash American teenager Hans Niemann, the kingdom begins to wobble. Here is an extract from Checkmate by Ben Mezrich.

September 4, 2022

A row of polished wooden tables snaking along the edge of a carpeted makeshift gaming hall, on the cavernous first floor of a converted vodka bar, right next door to the St Louis Chess Club, a redbrick building in the Central West End neighbourhood of St Louis, Missouri.

Ten minutes past one in the afternoon – and Magnus Carlsen’s world was crashing down around him.

This can’t be happening.

Magnus ran a hand through his dishevelled mane of auburn hair, a chaotic halo framing his disbelief. He was hunched over, his shoulders rounded beneath the material of his dark blue blazer; his strong, square features were glistening in sweat. One of his hands covered the lower half of his face, as if he could hide himself from the scene unfolding in front of him and somehow make it less real.

Impossible.

The pieces on the board seemed to dance and blur before his eyes. Usually, when he looked at a chessboard, the clarity was almost painful; he wouldn’t just see the pieces where they were, but where they were supposed to be. People who watched him play (and since before he could remember, people had always been watching him play) often described what he did at a chessboard as clairvoyant. He didn’t just see a dozen moves ahead, he saw to the end of the game, and often through the next game and the game after that.

His seemingly miraculous abilities elicited the sort of fandom usually reserved for rock stars and professional athletes. At the moment, the hall around Magnus was mostly devoid of people, other than the nine other competitors in the tournament, paired off at matching boards that ran in a row behind where he was sitting – yet there was an audience of fans outside the building, held back by the velvet ropes and security at the front entrance to the gaming area. Fans of a fifteen-hundred-year-old sport – albeit one that had once been a pastime reserved solely for royalty. And that gathering outside was only a small percentage of the attention focused on Magnus and his dismay at what was unfolding in front of him. Cameras caught every unkempt swirl of his hair, transporting every detail, beamed by satellite to thousands upon thousands of rabid chess fans watching online all around the world.

Magnus Carlsen wasn’t just another chess player. Nor was he merely the reigning champion of this particular tournament – the Sinquefield Cup, one of the most prestigious chess Grandmaster events in the United States, with a purse of $350,000 and an invite list that was usually reserved for the top ten players in the game.

Magnus Carlsen was, quite simply, the greatest player in the millennium-and-a-half history of chess.

He had begun his career as the youngest Grandmaster ever at the age of thirteen, his peak and current FIDE Elo rating – the numerical representation of his skill relative to other chess masters – of 2882 was likewise a record, higher even than Garry Kasparov, the Russian who had held the title of world champion from 1985 to 2000, or Bobby Fischer, the most famous – and controversial – American chess champion in history. Magnus was the holder of five World Championship titles, and at thirty-two was now more often compared to Mozart than to either Kasparov or Fischer. Coming into the Sinquefield Cup, he’d won a staggering fifty-three consecutive in-person games. And unlike most of his colleagues, he was a burgeoning celebrity away from the chessboard, with crossover, international appeal. His sponsorships included MasterCard, Unibet, and a bottled water company based in his home country of Norway. His own chess app, Play Magnus, was listed on the Oslo stock exchange with a valuation of over $100-million. He had millions of fans across his various social media accounts, and even among his fellow Grandmasters he was roundly considered the most dominant player to have ever played the game.

And yet, if the chess pieces currently swimming in front of his eyes weren’t some sort of terrible mirage – Magnus, the reigning deity of chess – was losing. 

Magnus blinked hard, trying to see a way out, and when that failed, he did what he’d been avoiding for the past ten minutes, and glanced across the table at his opponent. Immediately, he tasted bile rising up the inside of his throat.

The damn kid doesn’t even seem to be paying attention. Yes, a kid, barely nineteen years old, squarely a member of the next generation, Z, who had come of age in the midst of the pandemic, during which chess was almost exclusively a game of pixels on a screen. A nobody with a shock of wild, curly hair that made Magnus’s own seem tame. Beneath that hair, narrow eyes, pursed lips, rounded chin. He wasn’t even looking at the board; he was gazing around the hall, distracted, hell, he appeared to be chewing gum – as if he couldn’t even be bothered by the unimaginable event that was happening between them.

The truth was, Hans Niemann shouldn’t have been sitting across from a living legend like Magnus Carlsen. Niemann hadn’t even initially been invited to the Sinquefield tournament; although he was a Grandmaster, with a FIDE Elo ranking that had risen above 2650 during the previous year, he had been added to the roster as a last-minute replacement for Richárd Rapport, a player presently ranked sixteenth in the world, who had been caught up in Covid-related restrictions. Hans was barely ranked fortieth going into the Sinquefield, the lowest-placed competitor in the tournament. Hans was the one who should have been trembling in his seat. He was the one who should have been drenched in sweat, fighting for his life.

And yet when Hans had first sat down at the table, he’d stared right into Magnus’ eyes, his face a mask. He’d held that gaze for an unnatural minute – and from then on had spent his time at the table either staring off into space or, again, directly at Magnus. Magnus had been surprised by the strange behaviour. It wasn’t the first time he’d met Niemann; at a tournament in Miami two months earlier, they had played a friendly game on the beach while a number of other Grandmasters looked on. Magnus had won that match easily, and had instantly written the kid off as skilled but raw, prone to rushed play and brash moves. They’d played again in the Miami tournament two days later, and although Hans had taken an inconsequential one of three games off the world champion, Magnus had easily gone on to win the tournament’s top prize.

Since then, Magnus had heard stories about Hans’ behaviour outside of the game. There were plenty of wild rumours: profanity-laden interviews, trashed hotel rooms, grandiose pronouncements that were in no way backed up by tournament play. Some members of the industry were already calling him the current “bad boy of chess”, the sort of thing that made competitors at Magnus’ level roll their eyes. Players like Hans came and went, propped up more by the drama surrounding their antics than their game play. Hans was a provocateur, not a prodigy – and certainly not a threat. 

Perhaps that was the reason the world champion had started this game with an unconventional opening, utilising the Fianchetto Variation against Niemann’s version of the Nimzo-Indian. As Hans was playing the black pieces, the younger Grandmaster was already at a disadvantage, and Magnus had expected him to make the same sort of rushed mistakes that had made him easy to beat on the sand.

Instead, from the very beginning, Hans had countered every one of his moves with a near-optimal response. Deeper into the game, Hans’s play had become nothing short of sublime; at move forty-two, his knight escaped a bishop attack that only a handful of players in the world could have avoided. And then at move forty-eight, Hans had caught Magnus in a rare error with his king, and capitalised with a technically perfect response, capturing one of Magnus’ pawns. These weren’t simply defensive manoeuvres, they were statements. Precise, audacious.

Piece by piece, Hans was now outplaying the world champion. Chess games between Grandmasters were usually lost in much the same fashion that Hemingway had once described entrepreneurs going bankrupt – gradually and then suddenly. Staring at the swirling pieces, swallowing back the bitter taste that had risen from deep in his chest, Magnus knew that gradual was now on the verge of turning sudden.

He also knew that there was more at stake than a chess game, or even a high-profile tournament win. In 2022, chess was no longer a sport reserved for royalty; the game’s popularity had skyrocketed during the pandemic, and there were now an estimated half a billion regular chess players spread around the world. Along with this growth in popularity, chess had become big business; billions of dollars were pouring into the game via tournaments, sponsorships, technological development, and chess-centred conventions and events.

In the past few years, a single website had grown to dominate the new chess economy: Chess.com. The scrappy start-up that had begun as a place to chat about the sport and play friendly matches had turned into the ultimate online arena, now valued at over $1-billion. And Magnus himself was sitting on a virtual empire with his own app, Play Magnus – for which, just a few weeks earlier, he had already accepted an acquisition offer of $80-million from Chess.com: a deal that had not yet been made public.

That sale wouldn’t just make Magnus, already the best player in the game, the richest player in the game; it would solidify Chess.com’s dominance of the sport itself. There was no competing arena, no other place comparable for players to raise their profile in the sport, chase ratings or sponsorships, or find clients for paid tutoring and mentorship. Chess.com was the modern face of chess, and Magnus would soon be synonymous with their brand: brilliant, charismatic, indomitable.

And yet –

No longer gradually –

But suddenly –

This nobody – this f*****g kid – was beating him. DM

Checkmate is published by Pan Macmillan. It is available at a retail price of about R409.