Oslo: Rook and knight-shaped kegs complete with taps, chess books and pictures filling its walls and corners and built-in chess boards on its tables and countertops with bottles of alcohol stacked behind them – Good Knight hits the visual brief of a chess pub to near perfection. As an added bonus, they occasionally have a certain Magnus Carlsen dropping by when he’s in a mood for trivia night with friends.
Over the next two weeks, the pub is serving as the venue for the Norway Chess Open, which runs alongside the main tournament. Indian grandmaster siblings Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali and reigning world champion, Gukesh, are among its former participants. Krisotoffer Gressli, co-owner of the pub and organiser and chief arbiter of the Open event, decided on hosting the tournament in his pub after other venue options in the capital city turned out to hard to find. To make up for the lack of a big venue, the Open is split into two tournaments of seven rounds each.
Good Knight, Gressli jokes, was born out of him being out of work and desperate to find a way out. A store that sells chess books, sets was his initial idea. The expensive rents in Oslo and stores of such kind typically being open for just a third of the day didn’t seem like a viable proposition. ‘Why don’t we open a chess pub, then we can be open twice as much long’, friend and Grandmaster Torbjørn Ringdal Hansen suggested.
“It was a brilliant idea.” Gressli remarks. Five months later, Good Knight opened its doors for business for the first time. In attendance for the first time they hosted invitees at the pub, was Carlsen, who stopped by on his way to the airport for the 2018 World Championship match against Fabiano Caruana in London.
The night Carlsen won the title in London in the playoffs still stands as the day that saw the highest footfall at the pub – chess fans packed to the rafters, cheering their lungs out like that in a football pub and and Grandmaster Johan-Sebastian Christiansen working the bar and serving guests.
“Fifteen years or so ago when we went to pubs with our chess sets we were told – ‘oh you can’t have that here, put it down’. But then Magnus Carlson become a world champion and people began to find chess cool.”
The idea of such a pub also works because Norwegians can be introverted. Socializing in places that offer an activity—like chess, pinball, mini golf, bowling – can help relieve the pressure of making conversation and filling the awkward silences.
“Norwegians can be hard to get to know,” Gressli says “But after a couple of beers, we aren’t that introverted anymore. We kind of knew that it worked on a small scale, but we were really eager to see if it would work on a large scale because we have room for 100 players here. It actually works, so that’s quite fun to see.”
Good Knight, Gressli offers, is one of the few public settings in Norway where Carlsen is not hounded by fans. “It’s almost like he’s expected to be here since it’s a chess club so, and people leave him alone. This is a place he can be himself with his friends. He’s pretty knowledgeable about things outside chess too and has won trivia nights here which is usually about countries, capitals, flags (incidentally among Carlsen’s interests as a young boy).”
“When he doesn’t win, everybody loves it because they can say – I’ve been at the Good Knight and I beat Magnus!.
Gressli and his business partner, also one of Carlsen’s early coaches, Norwegian grandmaster Torbjørn Ringdal Hansen, chose the pub’s current name after abandoning their initial idea of naming it, ‘bad bishop’ when they realised it could be interpreted either as a strip club or as a reference to abuse scandals involving bishops.
“I’m comfortable to call this the world’s first chess pub. Of course, there’s a lot of chess pubs popping up everywhere – in Sweden, Paris and Bali.”
Ask if there’s been a table slam incident involving Carlsen at the chess pub and Gressli smiles. “In a place like this where the shoulders are a little bit lower, it can happen,”he says, “So maybe, maybe not. I never tell the stories that happen after the dark.”
