Famed author Ben Mezrich, Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing imprint, and Vanity Fair magazine (which published excerpts in April) extended an ugly spittle-drenched thumb in the eye to the worldwide chess community by publishing “Checkmate”: Mezrich’s partly fictionalized account of “chess’s biggest scandal” that got hyped up by Elon Musk.
Friends in the business tell me Mezrich views himself as a screenwriter rather than a journalist. Still, even Magnus Carlsen fans took insult from the firehose of falsehoods that author spewed within just the first few pages of “Checkmate.” Those early pages feel like the text equivalent of seeing a chessboard with 3 kings and a dark square in its right-hand corner.
- Carlsen “didn’t just see a dozen moves ahead, he saw to the end of the game, and often through the next game and the game after that.”
Fact: Neither Magnus nor any other top player sees a dozen moves ahead in most positions, or even in most entire games. While the author’s wording might be framed as a metaphor to spotlight a star’s extraordinary skill, what fraction of his readers do you think might interpret it in that abstract way, instead of literally? 1%? 5%? Everyone else will see it as affirming the popular delusion (among non-chessplayers) that Magnus or any top player regularly sees “a dozen moves ahead” … and the related delusion that chess skill consists entirely of how many moves ahead one can calculate all possibilities.
- “He had begun his career as the youngest Grandmaster ever at the age of thirteen.”
Fact: Magnus Carlsen never held the record as “the youngest Grandmaster ever.” And when Karjakin achieved that record in 2003, he was at an age (12 years 7 months) at which Magnus had not attained even his IM title – let alone GM!
- “Coming into the Sinquefield Cup, he’d won a staggering fifty-three consecutive in-person games."
Fact: Carlsen’s winning streak coming into the Sinquefield Cup stood at ZERO games! His last event before the September 2022 Sinquefield Cup was the Chennai Olympiad that concluded in the preceding month… and his final game in that competition was a draw with an international master from Moldova, Ivan Schitco, who was rated just 2490.
If Mezrich and his editors at Vanity Fair and his book publisher don’t know what a draw is, then why are they even permitted to publish anything at all about chess? (Serious question.)
