Interrugnum: Candidates and a vibrant account of global chess

As the Candidates in Cyprus is in its squeaky bum (apt given how much sitting down is required to compete) segment, India follows the fortunes of Pragg, Vaishali and Divya. We’ve been spoiled by 2024 when five Indians (three men and two women) qualified for the Candidates. Divya and Pragg aren’t not looking good but Vaishali appears top of her game.

Let’s take away our India-specific gaze and contemplate what the Candidates actually means in its full context. On April 17, the last man (and woman) left standing, Candidates trophy in hand will be “as close as he could be without yet having arrived: to the throne, to his lifelong dream, to immortality.” This is Canadian journalist Jordan Himelfarb’s description of the 2024 Toronto Candidates, that event a significant road stop in Interregnum, his soon-to-be-released book about the elite men’s chess circuit.

Post-Carlsen champ

The sub-text “Inside the Grueling and Glamourous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess” to that mouthful of a title is particularly helpful. But the word interregnum, Latin for the period between two kings, is actually perfect. Interregnum (Pegasus Books) traces the search for a post-Carlsen-era men’s world champion. In July 2022 China’s Ding Liren, a last-minute replacement for Russia’s Sergey Karjakin (banned due to his support for Russia’s war on Ukraine) finishes runner-up at the Madrid Candidates. A few weeks later five-time champion Magnus Carlsen abdicates, saying he won’t defend his title. The Candidates winner Ian Nepomniachtchi and runner-up Ding fought for the title the following summer, Ding emerging the winner.

Doubts began to whirl around about whether Ding was “a paper champion or the real thing.” Himelfarb, a post-pandemic chess convert, says, “Carlsen is gone… and we hadn’t quite seen a full cycle.” In the tumultuous interregnum that followed, Himelfarb follows the chess world in pursuit of its new champion. The book travels through the entire FIDE cycle with its four qualifying events for the Candidates and then the final match in Singapore. From where emerges our “boy with the beard” who becomes the 18th and youngest world champion in the event’s 138-year-history.

Himelfarb, a scrabble and bridge competitor, dived deeper into chess having watched Queen’s Gambit. Fascinated, he signed up to chess.com “like tens of millions,” playing and watching and finding it “a surprisingly compelling spectator sport.” While exploring chess history and its characters, Himelfarb sought “a definitive, popular account of elite chess culture.”

The thousands of chess books available fell into a cluster set – strategies, historical games, autobiographies, USA’s hunt for the next Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov’s bibliography on a range of topics. Not what Himelfarb was looking for. An accessible account of elite chess culture then became his “fun project”. He knew it would help to “take my mind off the bleak political landscape and the fear and loathing file that occupies my days.” In his day job, Himelfarb is Opinion Editor of the Toronto Star newspaper.

Interregnum is a sweeping, vibrant account of an ecosystem proliferated by genius, prodigies, oddballs and eccentrics, all of this sometimes in one person. Following the circuit on its way to the 2024 world title clash, Interregnum takes us through the sport’s histories, passions and obsessions. We read about all the crazy stuff – personality clashes, alpha male tantrums, accusations of “cheating”. It has detailed empathetic portraits of many of the contending grandmasters who now come from all corners of the globe.

Chess’ biggest star, however, remains the man who wants to totally topple classical chess. Himelfarb writes that Carslen, in his trash talking and click-baiting, deliberately defies, “the traditional image of the grandmaster as a figure of remote dignity, occasionally preferring the way of the troll.” He wants to speed up the sport – preferring shorter time-controls, setting up his own Champions Chess Tour, and supporting the Bobby Fischer-invented Chess 960/Freestyle Chess.

Many of Carlsen’s generation support him wanting chess, now computer-controlled in training and preparation, to draw out a player’s ‘instinct’ over classical chess’ “memory test” that goes “30-40 moves deep”. During his research, Himelfarb discovered that younger players, “who you might expect to agree with that assessment … have a more conservative view of the classical chess championship.” They love diving into rapid/blitz and bullet but “What they don’t want to see is a kind of transformation of the classical chess world championship, which is historically the pinnacle of achievement, into a faster, different game. They want that preserved.”

And so today, world chess still follows Cyprus. Through Interregnum we are drawn closer to the crushing pressures, anxieties, complexities and friendships of life on the elite chess circuit. Himelfarb says, “This is ultimately a story of the struggle to be the best…this one-on-one clash means so much to them. And winning is so much a part of their identity. It has the narrative elements of a great spectator sport.”

Classical chess, he says, is talked of as a sport, “for good reason”. Himelfarb read of a study that concluded that in a classical game lasting anything between four to five-plus hours, “because players are concentrating so hard, because they’re so tense…” burn around 1000 calories, “as many as a runner in a half-marathon, which is extraordinary.” So, Magnus only wants to sprint now?

Interregnum’s world is a lavishly described landscape, the GMs the field marshals over chequered battlefields. “I didn’t want there to be diagrams. There are lots of books like that are great resources, but that wasn’t the book I wanted to write.” What Himelfarb has written is a chess book that’s not just for everyone, but also for the ages.