Caleb Hara

Created November 10, 2021 as a hypothetical narrative for Sports Illustrated within Practicum: Writing in the Arts

You sit down at your computer, free from responsibility for the night. You boot up your browser to Twitch, as watching chess streams has been your main method of soothing cabin fever during quarantine. All of the usual suspects are online, and you have every expectation of skimming the list before settling into watching Hikaru Nakamura as you normally would. What you don’t know yet however, is that tonight is going to be different.

It begins by seeing a familiar face, in a place that face isn’t so familiar. A few accounts down from the top, the World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen is streaming. This is uncharacteristic of Magnus, as you’ve never seen him do this before outside of promotional cameos. What’s even more peculiar, is that he has a semi-final tournament match against the aforementioned Hikaru tomorrow. While you’ve seen Nakamura choose to play a night of casual blitz instead of preparing for serious games before, it isn’t something you imagine of Magnus. Your curiosity is piqued, and you decide to tune in.

“There are people in the chat who are saying I’m pretty humble. To that I have to say, there are more creative ways of insulting me. I’m not a humble guy at all, and I don’t wish to be.”

The first sentence you hear from Magnus after the stream loads. He’s sitting alone in a glass room, has knives for eyes, and an aggravated look plastered across his face. Some of his friends can be seen looking concerned through the glass in the background, but he looks as though he’ll bite their head off if they come to check on him. On the board, you can see that he’s slaughtering another grandmaster with minimal effort. He seems to be paying more attention to the people in chat than he is to the game itself.

“There’s the queen. There’s the knight. There’s mate. Cool.”

He finishes the game, and stares vacantly into the distance for a moment. While there’s a pause you focus in on the details of his setup, and everything becomes even stranger than it was before. For one, he isn’t playing on Chess24, the website that his company owns. He is instead playing on the site’s arch-rival, Chess.com. For two, he appears to have placed a cut-out of Chess24’s interface on top of the board’s surroundings.

Now, some context, as what Magnus is doing might be impossible to understand without. A recent feud between the two sites made headlines when Chess24 threatened legal action against Chess.com for streaming coverage of one of their tournaments. Chess.com used their own website for the coverage, despite Chess24 being the site used for both play and broadcast. Hikaru Nakamura being the largest brand ambassador of Chess.com, was very outspoken about what he saw as hypocrisy on the matter. To him, and many others, Chess24 and Magnus were simply jealous that Chess.com’s streams were boasting consistently higher view counts.

So, is Magnus now throwing a not-so-subliminal shot at Hikaru and Chess.com? You can’t be completely sure. But there is clearly some kind of symbolic meaning behind his actions. Your next urge is to switch over to Hikaru’s stream to see if you can glean his reaction to all of this. Just as you’re about to duplicate the tab however, someone makes a comment that causes another flare-up.

“Some are saying Hikaru is going to shut people up when I lose on Thursday? I don’t get it. Who is he going to shut up? And who am I going to lose to on Thursday? Because I’m definitely not losing to Hikaru.”

Never mind checking in on Nakamura, you decide. You grab a drink, and nestle into your seat. Over the next four hours, he crushes the entire site mercilessly, trash talking his way through every game.

“Probably the worst player in the world.”

“I’m going to beat this guy ten times in a row.”

“He’s probably pretty mad right now.”

His brutality makes you feel a bit uneasy, but it also feels like too much of a spectacle for you to turn it off. Quarantine has had the strange effect of making people in the public eye go skittish, and adopt a safe persona that minimizes their chance of controversy. To see someone acting so much the opposite, is like a shock to the senses. You keep watching until his friends finally coax him into a reasonable enough state to turn the stream off, and then you decide to call it a night yourself.

On Thursday, the next day, you tune in to see the score in the match between Magnus and Hikaru. Just in time to find out, that Magnus had won every single game. For some strange reason, Nakamura was too flustered to even put up a fight. He was crucified in every position. It wasn’t even close.