Chess and the Grudge Match
We've been doing this a long time, actually.
I’ve been reflecting a bit on the recently-concluded(?) Clash of Claims match between former world champion Vladimir Kramnik and Jose Martinez a bit more. I would describe this series of VK’s escalating accustions of Jospem cheating on Twitter as the beginning of a grudge that finally ended in a match that took place from June 7th-9th.
The circumstances are kind of ugly. Kramnik has very controversially chosen to air his grievances and home-grown statistical analysis on twitter and has continually insinuated or implied that other, “weaker” chess masters have been cheating during chess.com’s Titled Tuesday events. Whether these claims are valid or not (in my opinion, the vast majority are not), my interest is more in the idea that Jospem agreed to defend the legitimacy of his play against Kramnik in a mixed blitz match featuring the players playing on chess.com and over the board, in the same room as his accuser.
In the end, after much controversy and some technical errors on the chess.com website on da7 1, confirmed by chess.com’s staff themselves, over the next two days Jospem won the match with a combined score of 15.5-11.5. Under severe surveillance, and with his back to Kramnik’s only a few feet away, GM Jose Martinez outplayed the former world champ in the online chess sections and, to any reasonable person, vindicated his own skills with the mouse and his very strong blitz ability — and he did a pretty good job standing up to Kramnik over the board as well.
The propriety of the circumstances around the match notwithstanding, I do think it’s important to remember that in chess, the “gentleman’s game”, the existence of the grudge match features prominently. Yes, we’ve been proverbially dueling each other to death over the chessboard for multiple centuries now — even in today’s civilized age, apparently.
For instance, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the first official world championship match, played between Steinitz and Zukertort in 1886, was itself a grudge match. It was the culmination of a bitter rivalry that had been fought over the prevailing social media of its day — the chess magazine. So bitter was the masters’ rivalry that it was called “The Ink War”.
As we can see from Hendrik’s work, Steinitz continued to claim victory after victory over his rival even after Zukertort had died, and that shows how ugly these things can become. Imagine the impulse to speak ill of the dead on the grounds of a board game, and you can see how quickly one’s sense of honor can devolve into vice. Chess has always been full of healthy and unhealthy rivalries that push people to the limits of their abilities on the chessboard and their restraints in their communication.
Fischer and Reshevsky. Capablanca and Alekhine (post-1927). Magnus Carlsen and Hans Moke-Niemann. Korchnoi and Karpov. Kramnik and Topalov (and in this case, Kramnik was the victim of a false accusation of cheating). Kramnik and Jospem. Kramnik and… chess.com — and you get the point.
These are some of just a few infamous rivalries that have occurred in the modern game’s history. These players played many games against one another and part of the thrill of watching those games was knowing that in some sense it was personal. While it’s weird to think of “the gentleman’s game” being used in such a crass manner, it is indisputably part of the game’s history — even to the root of official world championship matches. Sometimes, stuff like this sets a precedent, so I’m interested to know if this is just the first of many Clash of Claims events, or simply a weird accident of chess existing in the age of online social media.
What are your thoughts on the Clash of Claims, and Kramnik’s accusations of cheating in online Titled Tuesdays events? Are they overblown? Do you think he’s right? Is this the way chess players should settle disputes at all? And does anybody actually think Kramnik will be satisfied with the results of the match?