Russians’ chances at the Grand Swiss chess tournament opening on the Isle of Man

One of the main chess competitions of the year opens today on the Isle of Man. At stake in the Grand Swiss Tournament are two tickets to the candidate tournament, in which next year eight grandmasters will determine the opponent for world champion Ding Liren in the next match for the title. The tournament according to the specific and fraught with all sorts of surprises Swiss system is the last chance to qualify for the eight for one of the Russian players besides the participant of the previous championship match, Ian Nepomniachtchi, who has already secured a place in it.

The value of the tournament starting on the Isle of Man is determined primarily by the scheme of the championship cycle. Its most important event, after the title match itself, will, of course, be, as usual, the candidate tournament, which determines the contender for the title. It will take place next year in Toronto. Eight grandmasters will play there, and they get to the top eight in different ways. At the moment, exactly half of the participants are known. Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi received the right to compete in Toronto automatically – as a loser in the championship match against Chinese Ding Liren last spring in Astana. Three more names became known after the World Cup in Baku ended in August. Actually, it was won by the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen. But, having voluntarily given up the championship title last year, which he had held for ten years, he has since not regained interest in hunting for it and refused a trip to Toronto. So slots in the candidate tournament went to the young Indian Rameshbabu Pragnanandha, who lost to him in the Baku final, as well as to the semi-finalists – the American Fabiano Caruana and the unexpectedly successful Azerbaijani Nijat Abasov.

There are two more trips at stake in the Grand Swiss. And it is definitely the last opportunity for any Russian chess player besides Nepomniachtchi to achieve the right to play in Toronto. There will be no others, despite the fact that formally two more vacancies will remain unfilled. It’s all about how they are distributed. One is based on the results of the so-called FIDE Circuit, that is, based on the sum of the results shown at major competitions this year, recognized by the International Chess Federation as, well, relevant. The second is according to the FIDE rating for January. So, in the top ten in the FIDE Circuit standings there are now no Russians, who, in principle, rarely come to international competitions since the spring of 2022. In the ranking, besides Nepomniachtchi, who is in sixth position, only Sergei Karyakin has a truly high 12th position. But after last year’s disqualification for supporting a military special operation in Ukraine, he does not want to have anything to do with FIDE.

In the long list of more than a hundred names of Grand Swiss participants there are also the names of famous Russian chess players (today clarification is required: they did not change their citizenship amid sanctions, like many of their colleagues) – veteran Alexander Grischuk, young Daniil Dubov, Vladislav Artemyev and Andrey Esipenko . It may, however, seem that their chances are slim. In the Grand Swiss seeding, the first Russian chess player, Grischuk, is in ninth place. The rest are not just slightly lower, but significantly lower. The Russian next to Grischuk, Dubov, is in the bottom twenty. And naturally, even FIDE, in its announcement of the tournament, does not highlight them as favorites, but the great grandmasters standing in front of Alexander Grischuk with constant playing practice at the elite level – two Americans, Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura, the Frenchman Alireza Firouzja, the Dutchman Anish Giri, Indian prodigies Dommaraju Gukesh and Rameshbabu Pragnanandhu.

But there are nuances. Firstly, there are no monsters like peak Magnus Carlsen among them, whatever one may say. Secondly, the youth – Firouzja, Indian chess players – are terribly unstable. And thirdly, the Grand Swiss format itself insists on the instability of any “paper” hierarchies. In the Swiss system, everyone has a different set of opponents, among whom there are both weaklings and giants, and because of its specifics, it regularly presents surprises, in this sense, not much different from the World Cup with its knockout system. Bakinsky brought a ticket to the candidate tournament to Nijat Abasov, who barely made it into the top 40 in the Grand Swiss seeding. All key Russian characters compared to him are natural masters.

Alexey Dospehov