By ANDREW HIGGINS
March 30, 2016
MOSCOW — In the chandeliered ballroom of Pashkov House, an 18th-century mansion on a hill overlooking the Kremlin, a chess grandmaster dressed in a jacket that seemed several sizes too big declined offerings of canapés, vodka and wine.
Surrounded by Moscow glitterati and well-groomed waiters who looked as if they had been borrowed from an expensive nightclub, the grandmaster, 23-year-old Fabiano Caruana of the United States, was not having much fun.
“This is not my favorite thing,” the cerebral Caruana said of the gala, held early this month to celebrate the start of the grueling World Chess Candidates tournament. “I just want to go back to my hotel.”
His discomfort at having to make small talk over cocktails with strangers who, for the most part, barely understood the game at which he excels helps explain why, in a sporting world filled with noisy stars and deep-pocketed corporate sponsors, chess remains a struggling also-ran.
Many world-class chess players are simply not cut out for the nonstop self-promotion that celebrity culture demands.
Still, while perhaps not the most effusive ambassador for his sport, Caruana was the man to whom chess aficionados and promoters had been looking to help turn the game into mass-market spectator sport at the World Chess Championship, which is set to begin in New York in November.
Those hopes took a big hit on Monday when Caruana, considered America’s best hope for a world championship title in decades, lost his final match in the Moscow tournament, folding to Sergey Karjakin of Russia and missing the chance to advance to the event in New York.
Karjakin will face the reigning champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, for the title.
“Didn’t quite work out at the end, but gave it a shot in a tough situation,” Caruana, who entered the match tied for first place with Karjakin, wrote on Twitter shortly after his defeat.
Caruana also used his Twitter post to congratulate Karjakin “on a well deserved victory,” showing the kind of manners that Bobby Fischer, the last American-born player to win the world championship, in 1972, was not known for.
Chess has come a long way since the days of Fischer, who sulked when he lost, gloated when he won and forfeited his title in 1975 when he declined to defend his crown.
The economics of chess have also moved on. Fischer’s Cold War showdown with Boris Spassky in 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland, was preceded by bitter wrangling over money, with Fischer agreeing to play only after he had secured a doubling of the world championship prize fund, initially set at $ 125,000 (the equivalent of around $ 700,000 today).
Ilya Merenzon, the chief executive of Agon, which holds the worldwide licensing and marketing rights to a series of tournaments held every two years to decide who is the world’s best player, said the prize fund for this year’s title match in New York would be 2 million euros ($ 2.2 million).
The rise of the personable Carlsen, who has been named one of the world’s sexiest men by the magazine Cosmopolitan, has given chess a dash of glamour long missing from a game often associated with the introverted or the plain odd, like the reclusive Fischer, who spent his later years spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“We are selling an elite event that we hope will be part of the global news cycle,” Merenzon said in an interview. He also noted that far more people around the world played chess than played golf, which he described as “much more boring than chess.”
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That chess has a passionate following was clear from a controversy that erupted during the Moscow tournament, which ended on Monday.
Merenzon had tried to make sure that live coverage of each move was available exclusively on his company’s website, WorldChess.com, and through NRK, the Norwegian state television company, which last year signed a six-year deal for chess rights worth nearly $ 2 million.
That created an uproar in the chess world, with complaints that Merenzon, by trying to enforce exclusivity, would only curb interest in the game and thus undermine his own goal of pushing chess into the mainstream.
Merenzon, whose company has filed three lawsuits seeking damages from websites that violated this exclusivity, said he merely wanted to turn chess into a sport like any other by ensuring that sponsors could be sure where the audience was — just as they know which TV channel will have the broadcast rights to the Super Bowl or the World Cup.
Holding chess tournaments costs lots of money, Merenzon said, so there has to be a system of exclusivity in place “for monetizing games in each world championship cycle.”
For much of the 20th century, tournament funding often came from resort and spa towns — like Carlsbad (in what was then Czechoslovakia) — that sponsored chess events as a way to attract attention and business. Iceland put up money for the Fischer-Spassky championship match for much the same reason.
Today, however, funding, including prize money, comes mostly from Merenzon’s company, Agon, which organizes world championship events for the World Chess Federation, known as FIDE.
Agon pays for halls, hotels, travel and a host of other costs and, in return, has exclusive rights to license the events, as it did with NRK, and to seek out corporate sponsors.
But getting big-name companies that pour billion of dollars into other sports to cough up for chess has been a struggle.
The principal sponsor of the Moscow event was a little-known Russia-based developer called Tashir, which plastered its corporate logo around the playing hall in a Soviet-era telegraph building near the Kremlin. Beluga, a high-end Russian vodka, sponsored a glassed-in V.I.P. room with leather club chairs and unlimited drinks.
Caruana, although a supremely gifted player, has two niche sponsors: the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis and the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. He has their patches on the baggy jacket he wears to matches and other public events.
Hikaru Nakamura, another American who played in Moscow and finished in fifth, is sponsored by Red Bull. He put a can next to the board at each of his 14 matches.
The idea of making chess able to fund itself and turn a profit like other sports gained prominence with the American entrepreneur Andrew Paulson, who set up Agon and in 2011 secured chess marketing rights for 11 years from the world federation. But he gave up trying to create a vibrant chess economy, sold Agon to Merenzon for a symbolic 1 pound and moved on to other ventures in London.
Merenzon had hoped that a victory in Moscow by either Caruana or Nakamura would prod interest from big American sponsors for the coming world championship.
“We would love to have an American be there,” Merenzon, a Russian who was educated in the United States, said when it still looked as if an American might win the right to challenge Carlsen. “It would be great for us to get more eyeballs in America.”
Andrey Filatov, the president of the Russian Chess Federation, said he was rooting for a Russian to win the world championship but also said he hoped that the United States would embrace the game as a commercial, as well as intellectual, enterprise.
To that end, Filatov said, he would like to see the victor in the American presidential election attend the opening of the world championship in New York and help give the sport some cachet.
Even without an American at the table in New York, Merenzon thinks that the number of chess players around the world — estimated at more than 600 million — makes chess an easy way to reach a vast, committed and often high-earning population.
Chess, Merenzon acknowledged, is often difficult to understand, particularly at the championship level, with games that include inscrutable moves and strategies that can leave even excellent players scratching their heads. But unlike other sports, Merenzon said, chess offers sponsors a chance to be associated with intelligence, discipline and cunning.
“It effectively means being smart, and this is something everyone wants to be,” he said.
To help non-grandmasters better understand what was actually going on during each match in Moscow, WorldChess.com posted all the moves as soon as they happened, along with a computer-generated meter that indicated which player had the advantage after each move. Live online commentary by chess masters and postmatch interviews with the players also helped make the game more accessible.
Seeking to add more pizazz to chess, Agon even used the Moscow event to try to rebrand Caruana and his seven rivals as hip, inviting photographers to take pictures of them as they strolled together across Red Square, as if they were members of a cool albeit unusually intelligent boy band.
Before the gala, the players had their hair done, were fitted for designer clothing and selected expensive watches in preparation for a photo shoot by the Russian edition of the magazine GQ, part of an effort by a Moscow luxury goods merchandiser that sponsors chess to add some glitz to the understated sport.
The competitors all played along gamely, but some chess aficionados found the exercise a bit unsettling.
“This is completely abnormal,” Rustam Kasimdzhanov, a grandmaster from Uzbekistan, said as he waited for Caruana and other players to emerge from a high-end clothing boutique in central Moscow. “But it is a good thing. Chess needs a little bit of glamour.”