The Tartan

There is something wrong with the world. Dogs are marrying cats, people are frolicking and dancing in the streets,. The Tartan is publishing funny jokes, Farnam hasn’t emailed in a few weeks.

And chess has become a major esport.

So that’s the thing, right, chess has historically been a game that has revelled in long, slow, plodding games. The time controls for classical chess games are in the hour-plus range for each player, expecting anyone at the board to take the time necessary to think through various lines, moves, and ideas before settling on the one they like the most. In fact, several famous games were played using correspondence chess, a method in which people mail moves to each other. Games can take a full day to make a move;, in fact, the now-famous Garry Kasparov vs the World game, in which at-the-time World Champion Garry Kasparov played against a consortium of international chess grandmasters, was run as a correspondence format (using email, this time). Kasparov, notably, won that game.

Chess is a game that has traditionally felt unapproachable from the perspective of fast-paced modern games. Without the excitement of Subway Surfers gameplay, my chess experience feels significantly worse, but that’s mostly because after I e4-c5 my way into a losing Sicilian position pretty quickly. 

The solution to this problem is the implementation of low-time controls, faster game methods like Rapid, Blitz, and Bullet. Rapid is any game under 15 minutes, Blitz is under five, and Bullet is under three. All three rely on players giving up their time to calculate and think which gives intuitive players with far more positional and board-based knowledge an advantage. Chess, when fast, is stressful, because now, taking a couple minutes to think through your move is upwards of 20 percent of your time. 

This leads to the 2025 Chessable Champion Chess Tour, a massive esports event that gives the best chess players the ability to compete for a share of a million dollar prize pool, and a format based on esports. The Chessable Masters was the first event that ran this year, inviting eight incredible players to put together the best possible product for viewers. The CCT is the spiritual successor to the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour from 2020, which meant that World No. 1 and former World Champion Magnus Carlsen was the first invite. Ian Nepomniachtchi, Fabiano Caruana, Alireza Firouzja, Hikaru Nakamura, Wesley So, Arjun Erigaisi, and R. Praggnanandhaa were also invited, making up a star studded cast of incredible players from the Tata Steel champion (Pragg), India’s top rated player (Arjun Erigaisi), and the top three players in the world (No. 2 Caruana, No. 3 Nakamura). The rest of the field was populated by play-in seats based on the Swiss rounds, including Yu Yangyi and Wei Yi, two incredible Chinese players.

The tournament was double-elimination, which meant players would play until they lost once, and then those who lost would play in a single-elimination loser’s bracket for the right to play the winner’s bracket winner for the championship. 

This was a very lopsided tournament. Carlsen beat Esipenko, a play-in candidate 3 games to 1, manhandled Yu Yangyi 2.5 to 0.5 (two wins and a draw), and then took an incredible win against Arjun in Armageddon. Armageddon is a format in which players bid time (the lowest wins) to play with the black pieces, and as a reward, the player with the black pieces gets draw odds, meaning they win on a draw. Carlsen beat Arjun to wind up in the Winners Final against Hikaru Nakamura. Nakamura had beaten Grischuk, 3-0’d Nepo, and then won a close match against Firouzja only to lose, 2.5 games to 0.5 against Carlsen.

This left Nakamura in the Loser’s Bracket, a rematch against Nepo, which ended much the same way, and put Hikaru back up against Carlsen for a rematch for the ages.

Carlsen got bored, decided to win 2.5 to 1.5 and Hikaru didn’t look like he had the inklings of a chance.

It was a disappointing result for the World No. 3, who has been hinting toward ending his professional career sometime soon, especially as his dominance over blitz and rapid formats seems to be dropping bit by bit as age catches up to him. The tournament was, unfortunately, business as usual for Carlsen, who was looking to win a major event after the disappointing loss to eventual champion Keymer in the Freestyle tournament a few weeks back. Regardless, Magnus Carlsen is rapidly on his way towards becoming the World Chess Esports champion, and while it’s another step is his complete and total domination of the game, it’s a little scary seeing someone who’s so fundamentally anti-classical become the face of so many different parts of chess.