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Title: Interregnum: Inside the Gruelling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess
Author: Jordan Himelfarb
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Pages: 320
French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously called the game of chess “the gymnasium of the mind.” Slightly less famously, H.G. Wells called it “a curse upon a man.”
In an 1897 essay, the science fiction writer and futurist determined “there is no happiness in chess,” a verdict he playfully delivers before commenting on the typical chess player: “a class of men – shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men – who gather in coffee-houses, and play with a desire that dieth not, and a fire that is not quenched.”
Wells, as it happened, was a very keen amateur player, though it’s impossible to know his rating. The Elo rating system, which accounts for losses and wins over time, became the standard in the 1960s.
This last fact was one of the many juicy tidbits (including that “Elo” doesn’t stand for anything, it was named after the system’s creator Arpad Elo) that I learned in Jordan Himelfarb’s absorbing new book, Interregnum.
Covering six months worth of games on the professional chess circuit, and culminating in the 2024 World Chess Champion match, Interregnum is partly a character study of the sport’s top players and partly an investigation into how the game is changing as the millennial grandmasters are overtaken by a new generation.
Himelfarb orders the book more or less chronologically around a series of important events leading up to the championship games, beginning with the World Cup in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the summer of 2023.
The choice to use the championship as the primary structuring device makes a kind of sense. Although, readers (such as, ahem, this one) who followed the event at the time and thus know the outcome of the three-year-old match might have a hard time staying invested in the drama – especially earlier in the book, before the main contenders are really in focus.
About halfway through, the pace really picks up and readers are treated to the spectacle of elite-level chess, as described by Himelfarb’s rollicking good sports writing. Where a player places a bishop or how they might manoeuvre a knight feels positively thrilling. The behind-the-scenes glimpses into the sacrifices necessary to play chess at the highest level only underscore the glory of a win – or, on the other side of the table, the pain of a loss.
Along the way, Himelfarb drops in observations about the game that extend beyond the race to become the champion. Some of these sidetracks feel fruitful and diverting, such as when he artfully outlines the history of chess in ancient India and foreshadows the country’s growing role in the modern era. Others, such as the perhaps too brief and certainly too segregated chapter on the stark gender disparity among the game’s top players, feel significantly less so.
Norway’s Magnus Carlsen competes in a Masters chess tournament in Amsterdam in January, 2023. Carlsen has dominated elite chess for the better part of a decade.KOEN VAN WEEL/AFP/Getty Images
Then again, the game itself is essentially infinite. In his 1950 paper theorizing the ability to program a computer to play chess, the American mathematician Claude Shannon found that there are more possible chess games than there are estimated observable atoms in the entire universe. The massive (though not technically infinite) number, which is expressed as 10120, is called the Shannon Number. And that’s just on the board, not even accounting for the personalities populating the game’s history.
For the most part, Himelfarb narrows his focus on the lead-up to the championship competition in order to create a portrait of the sport in transition.
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For the past decade, elite chess has been dominated by the millennial Norwegian player Magnus Carlsen. In that time, the online popularity of chess – as a game you can play, as a live sport you can watch on streaming, as a content category for YouTubers and Twitch streamers and TikTokers – has essentially exploded. So, too, has the ubiquity of increasingly sophisticated chess engines. Stockfish, a leading engine, can calculate over 20 moves into the future in less than half a second.
In the new era, players are studying with computer chess aids and playing late-night chess.com blitz games. Hikaru Nakamura, an American grandmaster profiled in Himelfarb’s book, makes millions more dollars from streaming chess content than from playing in tournaments. The game is very different now than it was for Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer, and there are more paths to fame – and even fortune – in the chess world.
Carlsen and Nakamura’s generation may have been the first to go online, but the new crop of super grandmasters and World Championship contenders (including the 2024 winner, not to completely spoil Interregnum), are digital natives. They are also coming from countries that have not historically dominated the game.
India’s Gukesh Dommaraju, the current and youngest world champion, was born in 2006. Some time this year, in a city yet to be announced, he’ll play a first-time contender, Uzbekistan’s Javokhir Sindarov, who was born in 2005. The competitors have the youngest combined age of any world chess champion contenders in history.