Peter Heine Nielsen lets out a loud sigh as he contemplates his response to the tricky question he’s been asked. Gukesh or Javokhir Sindarov, who’s winning the upcoming World Chess Championship in six months’ time?
Usually one of the most opinionated people in the sport, Magnus Carlsen’s Second weighs his words carefully. He gives the usual disclaimer about not knowing the two players too well personally. He points out that a World Championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik would be easier for him to predict. But predicting an outcome in a match between two 20-year-olds, that too largely unfamiliar to him, could be tricky.
“If either player wins by three points, I would not be massively shocked,” Nielsen says with a shrug. “My expectations from the match are generally quite wide. Normally you have an idea what’s going to happen, but here, anything could happen. They are both very cool players, take a lot of risks, and have a lot of confidence.”
Nielsen is a man who helped Carlsen win four of his World Championship titles as a second and has been with the world no 1 over a decade. Before that he also helped Viswanathan Anand win four of his own World Championship titles.
Nielsen points out that Sindarov is a “slight favourite” because of how the last few months have transpired. Gukesh has been bleeding rating points with losses at tournaments mounting up. The Uzbek challenger’s career, meanwhile, has shot off into the stratosphere with an unbeaten Candidates campaign.
“But just half a year ago we were not talking much about Sindarov,” he says, pointing at the fickle nature of form in players as young as Sindarov and Gukesh.
As Gukesh’s results have suffered since he became world champion, the criticism from all quarters has mounted on the boy who recently turned 20. Much of the criticism has come from former world champions like Garry Kasparov, Kramnik and Karpov, besides Carlsen, the man who is coached by Nielsen.
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Nielsen, however, is impressed by the way that the Indian played at the World Championship in 2024 to defeat Ding Liren and the way Gukesh’s coach Grzegorz Gajewski has pushed him.
“I’m very impressed with Gukesh’s team. Gajewski is very creative and I think he’s pushing Gukesh’s style really well. What they did in the World Championship match was a sort of very modern way of what we did with Vishy. We would try to make surprises, but they (Gukesh and Gajewski) will go to a much greater extent and were quite successful with it… It’s not a sensation he won the World Championship,” says Nielsen.
“He and his team came up with a very interesting strategy. The preparation was, in my opinion, very modern. He took incredible risk by putting incredible pressure on his opponent.”
Recently, after defeating Gukesh at Norway Chess, Carlsen had spoken about the Indian’s tendency to play aggressively in most games rather than trying to settle for draws.
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Nielsen understands that approach, even though when he was using it at the World Championship, former world champions like Kramnik were scathing in their opinions.
“If you have the style of Gukesh, you will lose some games where you look
very bad. Someone like (Vladimir) Kramnik can criticize that Gukesh looks like a player with no positional understanding when he loses this game. But at least we should acknowledge that Gukesh is doing it on purpose because he is taking risks which he thinks are justified to put his opponent under maximum pressure. While you look stupid when you lose, you still only lose one point. So he probably thinks this is the right strategy and it works for him. And it’s a courageous strategy. Others will maybe do it differently, but I think he was doing it on purpose and he became the world champion with it. One should appreciate that at least.”
Ask Nielsen if the world should make peace with the fact that the best player in the world at the moment is not interested in competing for the world championship and he points at other sports where World Cups or World Championships are sporting contests rather than a referendum about who is the best in the world.
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“We’ll have a World Cup in football now, but only sometimes the best team wins,” says Nielsen. “Chess has been incredibly privileged in that sense. We had Bobby Fischer, who was the best when he was world champion. Boris Spassky as well. Garry Kasparov and Magnus obviously. Vishy in his best years was also of course the best. But for fewer years: in 2008 and 2010 he was incredibly strong. 2012 of course, but perhaps less so to an extent.”
But talking about the new situation in a world where Carlsen refuses to fight for the world championship, Nielsen says: “It’s something we have to get used to, and also it’s no big deal in that sense. This is what sport should be. If we wanted a mathematical system to figure out who is the best, the rating should do fine!”
At some point during the chat, he draws a parallel to his own career.
“Someone said that I was the weakest player ever to reach 2700,” says Nielsen. “People think this is an insult. But for me, it’s a compliment. I was not strong enough to do it, but I did it anyway.”
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(The writer is in Oslo at the invitation of Norway Chess)
