Transcription
Something very strange keeps happening to world chess champions. In April 2023, Dingly Ren became the world champion. He played one tournament a couple of weeks later, finished eighth, and then didn't play competitive classical chess for 9 months. He dropped to world number 23, and he later revealed he'd been struggling with depression. The very next year, he lost his title to Gesh and has completely disappeared from elite chess and is listed inactive by Feday for not playing the minimum number of games.
Damaraju, the youngest world champion ever, had an incredible year leading up to his world championship match. Tied for first in Tatastile, won the candidates as an underdog. Went undefeated at the chess Olympiad, winning individual gold with a performance rating over 3,000. And since becoming world champion, Gesh has been really active, but his results have been a bit of a roller coaster. He started strong at Tatastel, but the tournaments that followed were far less convincing.
>> It's just so stressful being a GEH fan. There were flashes of brilliance like beating Magnus and Hikaru at Norway Chess, but overall things have been rough. Most recently, he tied for last at the Prague Masters. His rating even slipped to world number 20 before a final round win pulled him back up to number 15.
>> It's never a good sign if you've lost 70 rating points and the World Championship is in 6 months.
>> So, what is it about winning the World Championship that seems to break the people who achieve it? To be fair, this is not the norm. But there's a pattern here that's hard to ignore. Fischer became champion in '72, single-handedly dismantling the Soviet chess machine and then just disappeared from competitive chess. Male Tal, one of the most brilliant, creative world champions, only held the title for a year, although in his case, he was struggling with serious health problems. You could go even further back to Max Ova, who won the title in '35 after upsetting Allehe before losing it straight back in a rematch 2 years later. But beyond these exceptions, most world champions held the title for long stretches with the most dominant reigns lasting more than a decade.
So why do modern-day champions feel so unstable? Part of the answer is the Magnus effect. This man has broken the brains of chess fans. He held the title for 10 years. And in that time, he won pretty much everything, pretty much all the time across all formats year after year. He had a 30 to 60 point ELO gap between the number two player at all times. Even his bad tournaments often still ended with a top three finish. And when chess fans spend a decade watching the world champion be the undisputed best player, it really does set very unrealistic expectations for his successors. When he left the title in 2023 because he didn't want to deal with the pressure and quote was not in the mood, it left behind this vacuum where suddenly the next world champ wasn't the strongest player anymore. And he said it himself when he was asked whether any current player was on track to dominate the way he or Kasparov once had.
>> There is no one. There's no one at the moment. That's I mean that's the that's the honest answer. Um there could be but it's at the moment it's not it's not likely.
Setting aside Magnus, even without the comparison problem, there's some very fundamental shifts that take place once you become the world champion. You become a target. Anybody who touches the crown immediately becomes a target.
>> Every opponent treats their game against you very differently. They prepare deeper. Every game you play is scrutinized much more closely.
>> He's not a tactician. Mhm. He's more of a deep calculator and precise calculator.
>> I mean, for Gues, it's of course concerning, you know, because he he does have this uh really important event at the at the end of the year. He's the only person in the world guaranteed to to have that event. I mean, it can't feel nice to to be playing poorly. But more importantly, the goal disappears.
>> And that's one of the biggest challenges. You won and this is and somehow this is this you your your your mindset is different. Why for instance rematch was always a problem for many players in the past.
>> You spend your entire life working toward one thing. Every tournament, every training session, it all points in one direction. Once you win, the goal is gone. Ding spoke openly about losing motivation after winning the title. There's not so much obligation and not responsibilities. Just uh if I play not so well, there won't be so many people said I'm not a worse war champion. I don't think anybody's saying that.
>> It's not just a chess thing. Post-achievement depression is well documented in elite sport. The brain wired for pursuit doesn't know what to do when the pursuit is over. 2004 was my first taste of post-Olympic depression. You know, coming off such a high and it's basically you get to like the edge of the cliff and you're like, "Cool, now what?"
Gesh was 18 when he won. He hadn't even finished growing up and he'd already reached the peak of his sport and the internet makes it worse. Chess has millions of new fans, which is good, but it also means when the world champion has a rough patch, there are now millions of people online ready to explain exactly what's wrong with them. I think I'm sorry to the fans is that I mean obviously this tournament is kind of tough for me and like on some days I I just want to be left alone.
>> shown signs of real resilience though at Norway chess he started with two straight losses and then beat Magnus from a completely losing position and finish third.
>> I have to give my opponent credit like it doesn't come out of nowhere. If he doesn't start fighting like a lion in a lost position then we don't then we don't don't get there. Like he could have laid down, but he he didn't.
But even if Gesh does get over his current form, here is why it'll never be the same as the last couple decades of chess. Modern chess is simply much harder to dominate than it used to be. Engines have leveled the playing field in a way previous generations never experienced.
>> Wo! Deep blue has instantly sacrificed with knight captures E6. The gap between top players is smaller than ever before, and that gap is only going to shrink further with time. Tall is close to being the last time we had a situation where the world title was switching every other year.
>> Yeah. And and we are now in a potential situation where that might happen, where the challenger and and reigning champion are roughly the same strength, which could mean that we we see the title hopping from player to player. I truly think right now anybody in the top 20 in the world, anybody except Magnus cuz he doesn't care, thinks that they can be the world champion. So unless another anomaly like Magnus shows up, there will be no obvious dominant champion for the foreseeable future. But the good thing is it means chess is in a genuinely competitive era. And that also means we will very likely have a new world champion later this year because what happens in world championship matches is you have all these months of preparation so that people play people play sometimes a bit different opening lines to try and be very solid at the start. As the match progresses, people usually show their true colors in the sense that their weaknesses are amplified. They end up being pretty much the same player as they've shown recently. If Dane continues to play really poorly leading up to the World Championship match, I don't think we should necessarily expect him to be at a much higher level when the moment comes. Regardless of what happens, chess is clearly entering a very different era of world champions and we're watching that transition happen in real time.
>> It's very important that you know you you are not you are not becoming a victim of your own greatness. For me, it just was from one game to another, from one tournament to another. Somehow this was the like a nuclear reactor. So it was it never never stopped.
>> Magnus is in living in an era where there's almost no opening advantage
>> and therefore you see the differentiation much more. But they just want something very badly. Especially this habit of uh not coasting to a win to a first place but still trying to win more games is one trait I think both of them shared that I didn't have to the same degree. Gary said something uh funny and illustrative. He said um if it had been Vishy Kramnik they would have made a short draw in the last round gone to the press conference and explained what great people they were but I played a full game. I mean he's slagging me a bit but anyway u looking back now after a lot of time wow
>> I see uh I see that um uh that kern of what made him just very strong he still wanted to push his limits a lot
>> once in a generation talents are once in a generation for a reason it's it's not that