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It’s a draw. There’s nothing special about it.
Just a few hours ago, Fabi watched as Hikaru forced every one of his pieces into an exchange until there was nothing but two bare kings left on the board. It was a nice touch, he thought, and in some ways a poetic end to what may very well be his last chance at the championship. The two players on either side of the board had thrown everything at one another until there was nothing left to give, and nothing left to take. Chess played perfectly, as the saying goes, is always a draw. Fabi would even call it peaceful.
The board in front of him tells a different story. Black and white queens shuffle aimlessly about the board. Checking, moving out of check, Fabi’s pawns pushing desperately up the queenside only to be met with an impenetrable fortress on the dark squares. Whatever advantage Fabi may have had had been thrown away under time pressure some thirty moves ago.
There really is nothing special about it—there’s no stalemate in the end, no threefold repetition, just a knowing look shared between himself and Ian, his mouth forming around that dreadful word neither of them wants to offer, yet one of them has to say. Ian looks away. He twirls one of Fabi’s rooks idly between his fingers, thumps it hard against the table, and then outstretches a hand.
“I’m v—I’m very sorry,” Ian tells him, post-analysis. The remaining spectators in the hall had clapped their hands in applause when they finished their game, out of pity, maybe, or relief that they could finally go home. Fabi finds himself sharing this sentiment.
It’s been a long six hours. Perhaps the longest in his career, or his entire life to date. Not that there’s much of a difference between the two.
Steady as he can manage, Fabi rises from his chair. Locates his accreditation pass amid the spots in his vision. “It’s my fault,” he says, punctuated by the final thump of the rook in Ian’s hands as its felt base hits the table. He feels something inside of him threaten to break at the sound.
Fabi holds it together long enough for the press conference. This isn’t like the title match, it’s not like he or Ian could be fined for leaving the venue early, but at the same time there isn’t much of a reason for them not to attend. They may both be losers, now, but within the confines of those sixty-four squares, neither of them were lost. Fabi was even winning on three—no, four separate occasions—so now it’s his job to explain to the hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide where exactly he went wrong.
It’s often difficult, for Fabi, to prove that there is humanity in being a chess player. Ever since computers were taught to play chess, move accuracy among top-level players has peaked from anywhere between ninety to one hundred percent well into the middle and endgames. It’s often difficult, for Fabi, to sit still and listen as his opponent talks through several different lines they’d ran through an engine the night before and masquerade them as brilliancies. But such is the nature of the game, now, and Fabi would be a hypocrite to criticize it. As if he hadn’t done the exact same thing with his team for weeks leading up to the tournament as well.
He doesn’t need to do anything to prove the humanity of this particular match, however. It practically goes without saying. Fabi clicks forward with the mouse and watches the eval bar plummet, and rise, and plummet again, and it’s all so painfully human that he wonders when the word became synonymous with bad.
Leaning back in his chair, he lets Ian take the lead in their commentary. Ian is good at this sort of thing; it’s easy to be a good sport when you haven’t actually lost a Candidates match since 2020, but even that wouldn’t give the other man nearly enough credit. He looks about as beaten down as Fabi feels right now, and yet he’s still able to recite all of the possible line variations and their continuations with very few breaths in between. He even attempts to console Fabi, acknowledging how difficult it is to find the only winning move with sub two minutes on the clock, and the press officer empathetically agrees.
Ka2, she nods her head, looks very human.
Fabi releases his grip on the mouse. He looks toward the grand, floor-to-ceiling windows, to where the sun has already begun to set over the Toronto city sky, and calculates all the possible outcomes if he were to throw her laptop right out of it.
In a frankly impressive display of self-restraint, Fabi did not throw her laptop out the window. He managed to keep his cool throughout the rest of the conference, besides the few self-deprecating comments he’d made here and there, for how else was he supposed to describe how he felt in that moment other than like an idiot for ruining his best chance at becoming world champion over a few poorly-calculated lines. It’s embarrassing, really, how easily he cracks and crumbles under pressure. Any one of his peers could have won that endgame blindfolded, and yet—
Fabi shakes the thought from his head. He takes another sip of his drink (a rather girly-looking martini he honestly hadn’t intended to order) and the thinly-veiled alcoholic taste burns his throat on the way down. Fabi isn’t much of a drinker outside of social settings, and he isn’t one for social settings, either, so going alone to a bar had been a spur-of-the-moment decision for him. He just hopes this hole-in-the-wall is far enough from the venue so that nobody will recognize him sulking.
With the hand not clenched around his martini, Fabi thumbs through the notifications tab on his phone. The screen lights up with six missed calls from his girlfriend, a text from Cristian, and about a dozen motivational posts shared by his mother on Facebook. It’s nice to know that the people in his life really do care about him, though he wishes their concern wasn’t always a prophylactic measure to keep him from quitting chess indefinitely, or taking a nosedive off the CN Tower. Not that he would ever consider either of these things. He’s still got a few more years, at least, before he’s at risk of developing “the crazy.”
Regardless, he feels like an asshole to leave them worrying like this, while he flushes all the disappointment and frustration and hair-pulling shame out of his system, one sip at a time. He just wouldn’t know what to say to them. The words just aren’t there, and he’s not sure when they will be. How do you explain to the people who have supported you through thick and thin that you simply aren't good enough at the one thing you’ve ever been good at, and at this rate, probably never will be? It’s something he’s been grappling with since his crushing loss to Carlsen back in 2018, but even then there were chances. Where there is time to learn and reflect and come back stronger, there are always chances.
But 2018 was six years ago. Fabiano Caruana is now all of thirty-one years old, and he’s not sure if the champion wreath will be waiting on him any longer.
“Are you seriously drinking a martini right now?”
Christ. He really should have taken a closer look at the happy hour menu.
From the corner of his eye, Fabi watches Ian as he takes a seat on the stool beside him. The Russian player beckons the barkeep with a wave of his hand, and soon enough there is an entire bottle of vodka and two shot glasses placed in front of them. It’s amazing how certain stereotypes measure up to reality.
“And if I am?”
“Well, then I think you must be considering a switch to the women’s section soon.”
Fabi huffs out a dry laugh. “Very funny.”
Ian shrugs. “It’s the least I can do.”
It may just be a chance encounter, but talking with Ian like this feels surprisingly natural—considering they haven’t had so much as a proper conversation in all the years they’ve played against each other. There are a lot of misconceptions floating around internet chess circles, speculations as to what extent various “super” GMs like himself and Ian know each other, if they’re fond of each other, if they ever spend time together away from the board. The answer to most of these questions, which Fabi is sure many of those in the world’s top twenty would reflect, is not at all. At the end of the day, chess is an individual sport. The players whom Fabi considers to be his friends and those he faces over the board exist in entirely different dimensions.
And yet—talking with Ian like this makes him wish it didn’t have to be that way. Maybe it’s the alcohol in his system, maybe it’s the lack of journalists and microphones and cameras between them, but Fabi finds it remarkably easy to get along with Ian. There’s also the fact that they’ve never shared an experience as mutually painful as their match from earlier, before today. Between talk of the fickle Toronto weather and a few awkward encounters with fans, it doesn’t take long for the topic to rear its ugly head.
“You know, I was thinking,” Ian begins, with an accent that grows heavy as the hours stretch late, “...that if there weren’t any spectators above us, or cameras around us, we could’ve just settled the whole thing with a coin flip. Maybe it would have been more satisfying that way.”
Fabi shakes his head. “Even if something like that were possible, it wouldn’t have been fair. Especially not to Gukesh,” he says. “He outplayed us all, just by knowing that we couldn’t outplay each other.”
Ian, expressive as ever, pulls a face. Fabi knows this one well, it’s the same look he has whenever he’s met with a less-than-favorable position, but it feels somewhat alien to see it here, in a place where there are no boards in sight. When the unfavorable position they’ve found themselves in isn’t something they can so easily swindle.
Ian takes another shot. “I hate to say it, but what if… what if Nakamura was right. In calling it fate,” he says, and Fabi recognizes the callback to their press conference instantly. There’s nothing a chess journalist loves more than twisting the knife in a lost player’s wound. “Maybe this is it for us old-timers. We are not getting any younger, or sharper, and our ratings not any higher. Maybe it is just that time, yeah?”
Fabi watches the other man slump down against the bar. It’s strikingly reminiscent of the way he’d done so at the board, with his head buried in the crook of his elbow, as if to move one inch from his seat was to admit defeat.
“...The time for a new generation to overtake ours,” Ian concludes, and now gravity has bound them both to their respective seats. In the aftermath of a battle. When the dust has settled.
In this position, Fabi wonders how Kasparov must have felt—drawing with Magnus when the latter was just a child. How Anand must have felt losing the World Chess Championship to him nine years later, knowing, in the back of his mind, that the young player could’ve come for his title even sooner, if he felt so inclined. It must’ve been shocking, and humiliating, and utterly devastating to realize that—even after a lifetime of studying, with decades of experience under your belt and multiple world titles to your name—you are no better than a child prodigy.
But at the same time, they must have felt somewhat inspired, too. To think that, world titles and all, a child prodigy has become better than you.
Therein lies the difference between the likes of Kasparov and Anand, two former World Chess Champions, and himself and Nepo, two former World Chess Champion challengers. A one-word suffix to sum up the whole of their careers. Despite their best efforts, he and Ian have never been able to reach that level of greatness; they wouldn’t be the ones passing down the metaphorical baton, so what could they possibly have to gain from yielding to the future generation now?
It’s Fabi’s turn to make a face. “You don’t really think that.”
And Ian smiles something wicked. “Of course I don’t.”
“I want to beat them,” he admits.
“Not just beat them,” says Ian. “Next time, it will be a bloodbath for sure.”
Fabi can’t help but laugh at his sincerity, which, in turn, causes Ian to burst out in what can only be described as a fit of drunken giggles. Two professional chess players walk into a bar, drown their sorrows in cheap vodka, and trash-talk competitors nearly half their ages out of pure unadulterated spite. His chess coach growing up would surely be appalled by his behavior, but Fabi’s a little too tipsy, and a little too heartbroken to care.
Fabi swirls the olive around in his martini glass. “Can I ask you something? GM to GM.”
Ian fixes him with another look. “Depends on the question.”
“Do you ever regret it?” he continues, before he can stop himself. “I mean, becoming a—”
“I know what you mean.”
Becoming a professional chess player is all Fabiano Caruana has ever wanted to do. Not many people in this world can truly say that they make a living doing what they love, and Fabi feels endlessly grateful that he can. It’s a privilege to do what he does: to travel the world, to play in high-level tournaments with some of the best players of all time, to never worry about what event he must win just to keep food on the table—it’s like something out of a dream.
It should be enough as it is, he thinks. It has to be.
But then Fabi remembers his snotty-nosed, knobby-kneed ten-year-old self, with glasses too big for his face and sleeves too short on his arms, who used to have such vivid dreams of becoming the world champion, the crowd clapping and whistling loud in his ears and the ceremonial wreath draped heavy around his neck and a trophy half his size placed in his trembling hands, and yeah, okay. Maybe it’s not enough as it is, and maybe it’s okay to be greedy if it means that one day you might also be great.
(He just wishes someone would’ve taught him how to appreciate the journey of it, when he was still young. Sometimes the journey feels like it’s slowly eating him alive.)
“Yes,” Ian answers, followed almost immediately by, “...No. I don’t know. Some days I feel more regretful than others, and you’d think that today would be one of those days, but it isn’t.” He taps his fingers across the bar, as if itching for a pawn to fiddle with. “If anything I just want to keep playing. Add six, no, eight more rounds to the event and then we talk standings.”
“We’re already exhausted,” Fabi counters. “We’d get crushed.”
“...Maybe so,” Ian says, and the tapping stops. “I guess what I mean to say is that—I was not ready for it to end the way that it did. But there’s no point in torturing ourselves over it now.”
He’s not sure if the last comment was more a reassurance for himself or for Fabi, but he solemnly agrees with it either way.
For the first time since their conversation began, Fabi reaches over to the second glass the barkeep had set on the counter, pours himself a shot, and downs it all in one gulp. Or maybe two. The stuff really is nauseating; he’s not sure how Ian can stomach it so easily.
Must be genetic, he thinks, before downing another.
“2026, then?” Fabi says with a wince. He doesn’t miss the surprise coloring Ian’s face, and underneath it, the beginnings of respect. “Though you should try to win some actual tournaments in the meantime, unless you’re planning on holding Ian Nepomniachtchi’s ‘race to the candidates’ next year.”
“Do not disrespect me like this,” Ian says quickly, looking at him now as if he’d massacred his entire family in cold blood, which—might actually be a good thing for them. It means they’re back in familiar territory. Shark-infested waters.
Fabi only smiles. “My fault,” he says under his breath, so much easier this time than before, and the other man must sense this, too.
Ian just shakes his head. He pours them both another round and clinks their glasses together, listening to the sound reverberate through the air until it fades, gradually, into the hustle and bustle of the bar, the vastness of the city, the world which had room enough for the two of them after all.
Fabi, what was the most interesting conversation you had with a player from another country?
He hadn’t known what to expect at the closing ceremony. Unlike his matches, this particular question, asked of him while the entire room waits silently for his answer, is not something he could’ve prepared for.
Despite this, his answer comes rather easily. He’s lucky to have a conversation already in mind.
“I think the best conversations,” Fabi begins, and it’s not exactly a coincidence when Ian’s eyes meet his from across the hall. The Russian player had been completely withdrawn from the ceremony thus far, dismissing each and every question in favor of staring down the tablecloth, but in this moment, Fabi has his attention rapt. There’s even the ghost of a smile on his face, imperceptible to everyone else in the hall.
Everyone but him.
“...Are best left unsaid," Fabi finishes, and even the interviewer lets him keep his secret, this time.
Curtain call, doors close, show’s over. They’ll be wreaking havoc at the Candidates in another two years, and Fabi is looking forward to meeting Ian again there, right at the finish line.