Chess: Magnus Carlsen ‘unlikely’ to defend crown, but questions remain

Magnus Carlsen has again stated that he is “unlikely” to defend his world title against the winner of the eight-player Candidates scheduled for Madrid in June and explained that he felt more comfortable in the years before 2013 when he was ranked No 1 but had not yet defeated India’s Vishy Anand in the world title match in Chennai. Since then Carlsen has won five championship matches – twice against Anand, and one each against Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, Fabiano Caruana of the US, and Russia’s Ian Nepolmiachtchi.

Carlsen’s statement, made in an interview with the Norwegian newspaper VG, goes further than when he last spoke about the title following his crushing win over Nepomniachtchi in December. Then his stance was that he would only play a challenger from a younger generation, which pointed to 18-year-old Alireza Firouzja, formerly of Iran and now of France, who in 2021 became the youngest in chess history to achieve a 2800 rating,a recognised level for world champions and challengers.

This time there is no reference to Firouzja, who has played little since his successes of last autumn, but is assumed to have been preparing opening bombs and is still firmly installed among the Candidates favourites.

Against Firouzja is the poor record of teenage candidates, as Bobby Fischer (twice), Boris Spassky and Carlsen himself all failed to win, while the youngest ever world champions remain Garry Kasparov and Carlsen at age 22, followed by Mikhail Tal and Anatoly Karpov at 23.

That still leaves a practical question which will be answered only in June. Will Carlsen still abandon his title if the challenger’s backers can increase the prize fund considerably from its present level of €2m? The amounts now are much larger, but the