This was the first time I’d paid proper attention to chess match for a very long time. It was pretty good fun!

  • There appeared to be four official(-ish?) streams. The FIDE and Chess24 “Deep Dive” streams were of the “two extremely accomplished chess players chatting over Zoom”” variety, and were too dry for me. The most professionally produced, probably the most dumbed-down (although only relatively speaking), and my favourite, was the Chess24 “Global” stream; British Grandmaster David Howell was very good in a sort of joint presenter/analyst position. The Chess.com stream was perhaps objectively the best, and had last-time’s challenger Fabiano Caruana as analyst, but the dark set, big leather chairs, usually-all-US line-up, usually-all-male line-up and – forgive me – the presenter’s voice made it unbearably bro-y to me.

  • Game 6 was the obvious highlight and a tremendously exciting (and long!) game. Games 1-5 were sometimes tense to start with before resolving into fairly dry draws, and Nepomniachtchi made some big errors in many of the later games.

  • I hadn’t appreciated before what a big deal move 40 is in structuring the game. Players have 2 hours for the first 40 moves, then get an extra hour, so if there’s time trouble it comes around move 40 (this happened most memorably in Game 6). It’s also the first place players are allowed to agree a draw. So once the opening is over, move 40 becomes the next “road marker”. On one hand, this adds some structure and a point of interest, but it does feel a bit artificial.

  • There’s a lot of talk (especially from Carlsen) of tightening time controls in the future. While there was a certain majesty to the 7-hours-plus of Game 6, I think on balance slightly tighter time controls would be better. But, on the other hand, panicky time scrambles at this level seem a bit artificial. I think I’d like to see the tighter time controls come with more use of increments (“an extra 30 seconds added to your clock after each move”) than the “X minutes for Y moves” variety, which would tighten things on players while trying to avoid blunder-filled mad rushes when the Y moves are nearly up.

  • (It’s clear in hindsight, I think, that the response to computers comprehensively pulling ahead of humans would be that the most popular forms of chess are not trying to make humans more perfect with longer time, but in fact making humans highly imperfect – and highly human – with very tight, even ridiculously tight, time controls for online chess. Nonetheless, it wasn’t what I predicted back 15 years ago, or whenever.)

  • The match situation after game 6 – Carlsen being ahead, Nepomniachtchi needing to catch up ––seemed to have quite a big psychological effect, but didn’t really effect either player’s tactics as much as one might have expected. We didn’t only see daring gambles from the player behind and “safety first” from the player in front. Maybe we just didn’t get close enough to the end before it was all decided? (The obvious place where match tactics did seem to matter was the early-middlegame in game 8, where Carlsen offered to exchange quite a few pieces and Nepomniachtchi refused. This was arguably positive expected-value for Nepo, but it didn’t work out, and the match was pretty lost from then.)

  • Viewing it as a sporting event, it was a shame how rare it was for both players to be simultaneously at the table. Nepomniachtchi in particular spent huge amounts of time away from the board, often coming back for a last check that his pre-planned move is OK, then leaving after making it. Obviously players have to be allowed to go to the loo or eat a sandwich or whatever, but at some point it was too much like computers playing each other than real people. I’m not sure if rule changes are feasible here, but I’d like to see the organisers try.

  • Carlsen’s personality is an interesting combination of heavy determination to be the best, a high degree of arrogance that he is the best, but also a hint that he understands the whole thing is sort of ridiculous. (Barack Obama also had this combination. Who else? Usain Bolt is too relaxed; Elon Musk isn’t serious enough; Cristiano Ronaldo isn’t funny enough. Bradley Wiggins circa 2012, maybe? Or Kanye circa 2005?)