“It demands total concentration.”
“It’s our Mount Olympus.”
These are some of the quotes describing chess and its competitive nature.
“You lose weight during a chess tournament of this intensity. The pressure is absolutely enormous,” chess reporter Malcolm Pein of The Daily Telegraph told CNN.
The World Chess Championships began on Monday, when reigning champion Ding Liren didn’t waste any time taking Game 1. He defeated 18-year-old prodigy Gukesh Dommaraju — the youngest to ever compete for the world title.
Gukesh has also been named in the same sentence as iconic chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer.
A great start for Liren.
Chief officer of Chess.com, Danny Rensch said there are intense pressures that come with the sport. It’s in a way of how they compose themselves and how those playing can withstand.
“Some of them have the habit of getting up and not actually spending a lot of time sitting at the board when it’s not their turn … to keep their blood flowing. Some of them do this just because that’s how they deal with the stress and nerves,” Rensch said, according to CNN.
Before that first game between Ding and Gukesh, the storylines surrounding the match were fierce.
Five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen evaluated the two facing each other.
“Ding cannot lose the first game … from what we’ve seen from Ding for the last one-and-a-half years, I don’t think he’ll come back from losing the first game, so I agree, hesitantly, that he’s going to be the first person to win a game, but I’m very uncertain,” he told Chess.com. “The only way there’s going to be a low number of decisive games is that Ding gets chances and keeps missing them. We could see a bloodbath.”
A bloodbath.
Honesty — sign me up.
