Each player is allowed two hours to make their first forty moves and another hour for the next twenty, with a further allocation if games go on beyond that. The games in Dubai will be played at a classical time limit.

He fights Carlsen for a share of $2 million a Russian DotA team recently won $18 million.Īnother factor in Nepomniachtchi’s favour is Carlsen’s expressed dislike for the world title format. Had he had to make the decision more recently, he might have plumped for the video game. In his early twenties he spent ten hours a day playing Defence of the Ancients on his computer and was good enough to find the choice between esports and chess less than straightforward. ‘Nepo’ dedicated himself to chess relatively late, becoming a grandmaster at the age of 17 (three years after Carlsen) and graduating from university, which is rare among top class professional players, whose institutional education typically ends some time in their early to mid teens.

He goes into the match knowing he can compete with Carlsen at all forms of the game and has been getting in shape, apparently shedding ten kilos at his training camp.

But there are reasons to think Nepomniachtchi has better chances than the one in five odds implied by the the statistics. But the last of Nepomniachtchi’s four victories was in 2017, when Carlsen was said to have been suffering with a cold.Ĭarlsen is the heavy favourite now: the rating difference between the two indicates an early finish, with Carlsen gaining the requisite 7.5 points before the last game. Nepomniachtchi won twice in youth tournaments before both became grandmasters and in their thirteen classical encounters Carlsen has won only once. They are the same age and have been playing each other for nearly twenty years. His challenger is Ian Nepomniachtchi, currently ranked fifth in the world. He has been world number one continuously since his late teens. He will turn 31 at the end of the month, on the day of the fourth of fourteen scheduled match games. Three years after his last title match in London, the world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is defending his crown for the fourth time in Dubai.

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