Twenty years ago, the continued longevity of the game was in question because of the arrival of an all-conquering machine interloper. Chess is in rude health.Īnd that may be surprising to you. The Carlsen-Caruana match will be followed avidly by millions of others globally on the internet, or in person for those lucky enough to get a ticket to the Holborn venue. It will be the first time since Bobby Fischer’s 1972 “Match of the Century” against the Russian Boris Spassky that an American-born player has the chance to take the title-something US chess fans are getting very excited about. Twelve games over three weeks decide who will become the next world champion. On 9th November, Carlsen, the current world chess champion, will face the 26-year-old Italian-American Fabiano Caruana in London. His real edge remains a mystery-even to himself. What makes Magnus Carlsen the best player in the world? Obviously, the 27-year-old Norwegian grandmaster possesses a superb memory, an ability to calculate ahead and highly-developed pattern recognition skills. Some people play chess well, but don’t really understand how they do it. The rules of language are one such thing. Humans are unable to articulate fully many things that we manage to do quite well. You might say: “I am not nearly as good at chess as I am at backgammon.” You wouldn’t say: “I am not almost as good at chess as I am at backgammon.” And yet if you’re a native English speaker, you’ll almost certainly (as opposed to “nearly certainly”) be able to use the two words correctly. What is the difference between “almost” and “nearly”? What rules dictate the selection of one word in a sentence rather than the other? You’re unlikely to know.

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