Ian Nepomniachtchi: “The strategy was not to lose”

This interview was originally posted on FIDE’s official website

Ian, you won one of the most important events in every chess player’s career and qualified for the World Championship Match. It’s a great achievement, congratulations! So, how do you feel now?

- Thank you. I feel really exhausted because it was an incredible tournament in many, many senses of the word. First of all, I guess it took 400 days from start to finish, it is kind of outstanding. Well, when you read about chess history, players were travelling by sea, from America to Europe and so on… In our times, you know, it’s not romantic at all because of the global pandemic thing.

I think the most difficult part was not playing chess, but these 13 months between the first and second legs, during which one somehow needed to keep one’s focus, needed to prepare constantly thinking about other guys: what were they doing, how did they prepare, what were they going to play, because basically, it’s one year between the tournaments and only seven games to prepare for. So, you should be ready that you’re going to face completely different players in a completely different situation.

I believe, for instance, Ding played really poorly in the first leg, scoring –2, and now, in the second leg, he scored +2. He also beat me on the last day. It’s just one of the examples.

Yes, it was a very long and nervous period of expectation and negotiations, but still, in one of his interviews, Anatoly Karpov said that this one-year break would do you good because probably you would save more energy for the second part. Do you agree with this?

- Well, especially now when I know the result — yes. Indeed, I’m not the person who should whine about this long break, since in the end, I won the whole thing. However, I’d say that this also would help other guys, because, you know, the Candidates Tournament is a very difficult competition, the stakes are very high, and there’s only one place, so it doesn’t matter if you finish on +1, or +2, or earn some rating: you should score the maximum amount of points, you should take the first place. Basically, you can earn some rating, you can play some good games, but all this will never make you happy unless you win the Candidates.

If you remember the last year, everyone was afraid of the COVID-19. As for me, on my last training session before the tournament, I got a slight cold, but somehow it was going worse and worse and worse, and by the end of the tournament, I was feeling really bad. As far as I remember, in the last game of the first leg against Maxime, I actually skipped most of my preparation because I was feeling so bad that I just wanted to save as much energy as I could, but it produced the opposite effect. I just mixed up moves in the line that happened and quickly got a worse, almost lost position. After that game, the situation wasn’t that clear anymore. I was on a +3 score, in a commanding position, but then I ended up sharing first place on +2 with Vachier-Lagrave, and it was very bad news for me.

Anyway, I was determined to show that this was just a random slump, and I was preparing hard for my next game against Anish… I was very shocked and disappointed when I learned that the tournament was stopped to be resumed “sometime in the future”. Then some time passed, and I understood that I was very far from my best conditions, so I guess this [stopping and resumption] made me a really big favorite.

- What was your strategy before the second part?

- The strategy was quite simple: not to lose (laughs). Because, well, it may sound funny, but in general, I had an opportunity to commentate on two last editions of the FIDE Candidates Tournament. In Moscow 2016, we commentated with Miroshnichenko, and it was only for one half of the tournament. I think I was also helping Svidler a little bit during the event but wasn’t really involved in it. In 2018, I covered the tournament fully on my Twitch channel. And I noticed that people were just going completely crazy for some reason. Perhaps the stakes are so high that they can’t help it… The smaller problem is they can’t play their best chess. They are affected by the strength of their opponents, their good preparation, and the pressure. But it goes without saying that the bigger problem is that sometimes you’re just going completely crazy, you play some moves or make some decisions you’d never make in any other circumstances. It was a big lesson for me, especially commentating on Kramnik’s games. I guess he’d played six or seven decisive games: win-loss, win-loss, win-loss… Well, OK, win and loss are the same as two draws, but they don’t bring you closer to the first place.

At some point, I realized that as far as I scored +2, I was kind of lucky because the games against Wang Hao and Ding Liren at the start of the tournament went really well for me, I got something I prepared for, and I managed to convert, of course, not as smoothly as I wanted, but still. And I thought, all right, I have four White games in the second part of the tournament, while Maxime has four Blakc games. I feel that MVL is more a “white” player, he does want to push with White, it’s one of his strengths. On the other hand, his repertoire with Black is a little bit risky for such a tournament. I mean, people had one year to prepare… Last year, it wasn’t such a big problem for him because no one prepared for Maxime. Everyone was getting ready for Teimour Radjabov, so they analyzed, say, the Berlin Defence or the Queen’s Gambit. At the end of the day, Vachier-Lagrave is a completely different player with a completely different style and openings, he came as a replacement, so no one was ready to pose problems for him, and I guess this helped him a lot last year. Usually, any last-minute replacement is always like a dark horse that can win the whole thing. This FIDE Candidates was quite a case of that.

- Speaking about online chess. Now that you’re going to play the World Championship Match, will you reduce the number of online events you’re taking part in?

- That’s a good question. I’m not so sure if it really affects me because I should say I never took it too seriously. For example, Fabiano just stopped playing online at some point, and I think he didn’t take part in the next series of the Champions Tour or something. He just completely stopped any online activity. Maybe he played a couple of Titled Tuesdays, but I’m not sure about this. And somehow, it was also a major question for me if I was going to play in this final event of the series, but I just checked the calendar, and I thought “OK, well, there’s one month, and anyway, I need some practice”.

So, I could, for example, play a training match against Nikita, but it wouldn’t be as competitive as fighting against the finest players. In the end, I thought that probably one month was enough to have a rest, so I was planning to play for three-five days, then get knocked out to get practice and don’t grow too tired. However, it went by the second-worst scenario. The worst scenario was playing the match for third place and lose, and the second-worst was playing the finals and lose. I didn’t win the event at the end and grew very tired. I had my final and very important training session right after this tournament, and on the first couple of days, I was just completely procrastinating and didn’t do anything. I was watching guys studying some chess, analysing positions and saying, “OK, guys, very nice, very nice, I’m going for a walk, keep up the good work.”

The problem is that the current format is probably too hard for players. I guess we all want some drama and excitement, a lot of games, twists and turns, and so on, but playing for nine days, without a break in the current format is too much, I guess. That’s why I’ll think twice if I’m going to play more. I assume I have some chances to qualify for the final of this tour, which is going to be held in the USA, but at the moment, I’m not sure if I really need this. I guess it’s vital in life to focus on things that really matter, and with all due respect for this huge chess boom we have online, also thanks to these tournaments, I can’t say that it matters to me anywhere near classical chess and especially the World Championship cycle.

Recent World Championship Matches saw too many draws, and they were decided on a tiebreaker. So, what do you expect from your match? Is it going to be more bloody?

• Once again, I should remind you that I didn’t only commentate on the Candidates Tournament, but also commentated on the last match between Fabiano and Magnus. At some point, I was saying to the viewers, “Okay, guys, but today there’s no way it’s going to be a draw, look, the position is so complex, even theoretically it’s not going to happen — the seventh draw in a row, the ninth draw in a row…” In the last round, Magnus had a very nice position, but he decided to go to the tie-break, he made a draw in a position that I thought was nearly winning for him. So, never say never. I don’t know what to expect. First of all, I expect myself to prepare well and play well, and I don’t think I should care a lot about the rest.

- How are you going to celebrate the victory in the Candidates Tournament?

- Surely, first of all, I’ll get some good rest. The night before the last round was the first night in the last two or three weeks when I slept really well, without any extra thoughts, like “Am I going to…”. It was very difficult mentally since you understood that if you didn’t win the Candidates, this tremendous amount of work was going into the blue. I mean, you can use your novelties in the next tournament, you can earn some rating points, you can play a few good games, but it’s all very, very different once you have the goal, and when you miss it, it’s just a very sad story. So, when I secured the victory, it was the first time I slept well in the night — maybe it’s somehow related to my poor game in the last round (laughs)?

When I come to Moscow, I’ll probably have a small party with my close friends, but I don’t think I have enough time to celebrate. I don’t have a whole year before the next event; it’s only half a year. I guess when you say “half a year”, you think “Wow, it’s quite some time”, there’s enough time to train. However, frankly speaking, we got the experience of having one year of preparation for seven games and ending up with “OK, but we didn’t see this, this, this and this” and “Come on, how could we play like this, how could we prepare that badly?” Anyway, you have this feeling, and it means that there’s never enough time to prepare. Now, there’s half a year to get ready for the World Championship Match, and I’ll have two years of preparation for the next one (laughs). For this one, I think I’m already in time trouble. So I guess there’s really not enough time to celebrate and to have a rest. I think it’ll be very smooth, and then I’ll start to prepare, prepare and prepare again.