World Chess Championship 2021

Tomorrow the next World Championship match begins, delayed a year by the pandemic, between incumbent Magnus Carlsen and challenger Ian Nepomniatchi in Dubai. The whole chess world has been waiting for some time for this match to start, not least of which the players have likely been anxious to begin, and personally I’m super excited it’s actually here. Nepo’s aggressive style should hopefully produce some decisive results after the much-criticised drawfest that was the Carlsen v Caruana match in 2018 but he is a notoriously moody player - the consensus is that if he is in a good mood and gets an early win, he could produce some creative and flashy chess and win more games in flashes of brilliance, but if he suffers an early loss he may crumble and the barricades will have been breached for Carlsen to storm through. Both players seem equally as confident, and while Carlsen is universally acknowledged as the favourite, the feeling is also that Nepo has a better chance of victory than Carlsen’s previous challengers in Caruana and Karjakin.

It’ll be three whole weeks of the best chess that humans have to offer, and I fully intend to be glued to it the whole time.