The London Chess Classic Is Back And More British Than Ever
The London Chess Classic (LCC) was one of the first tournaments I heard of when I first entered the chess world in 2020. Previously hosted in West London at the Kensington Olympia, a place I had only ever visited for Christmas markets, the Classic has since moved to the Arsenal football stadium in North London.
The 2024 LCC is the first time since the pandemic that this historic tournament has been re-opened to the public and to casual players like me. It's also the first time ever in the tournament's history that the top three scoring players have all been English!
For the past few years, the organizers have only hosted the elite event, where some of the world's best chess grandmasters compete in a round-robin tournament. When I heard that I could compete this year in an Under 2000 event, I knew I had to play. I wasn't planning on any more tournaments before the end of the year, but sometimes exceptions have to be made.
I've only ever been to two football stadiums in my lifetime, and both were for Taylor Swift concerts, so I didn't really know what to expect from the venue. Even though London is where I spent much of my chess infancy (learning basic chess tactics and how to run OBS streaming software during the COVID lockdown at my ex-boyfriend's house), I had never played a chess tournament in England... until now.
So I spent nearly two weeks in London, half focused on my own chess and the other half watching the FIDE World Championship. I saw my first ever fox up-close walking home from the closing dinner in the early hours, got caught in the middle of a storm that battered the U.K., and cooed over many tiny dogs wearing little jackets in the cold weather.
Also playing in the tournament was my friend Caitlin Reid, whom I met at the 2022 Chennai Olympiad, where she played on the Scottish women's team. As I've said before, playing a chess tournament solo can be an incredibly lonely experience, and so her company made the entire trip so much more enjoyable. She also got revenge for me on an opponent whom I'd let walk away with a draw. Thanks, Caitlin.
Still, it's impossible for me not to be reminded of the months I spent in London when I was learning the very basics of chess, feeling entirely lost after graduating into a COVID-19 job market, and trying to find structure and understanding in a board game when I couldn't make sense of the real world around me. Returning several years later, with a mostly improved understanding of how to play chess (and life), felt strange.
On the train to London, I was at the tail-end of Sally Rooney's new-ish novel Intermezzo, which (like all of Rooney's novels) deals with angsty 20-somethings, except this time one of them is a chess player. Yes, I know it was written just for me. In Intermezzo, the protagonist Ivan says that maybe "we recognize patterns when there are no patterns ... like there's a meaning behind everything." So, is coming back to where it all started for me, with chess, with content, not that deep after all? Perhaps I'm just looking for "some kind of order in the universe ... [by] playing chess." This is something I thought about a lot throughout the event.
The name "London Chess Classic," like "Reykjavik Open" or "Wijk aan Zee," holds weight among chess players. It's a tournament countless grandmasters have played; just last year, now World Chess Champion GM Gukesh Dommaraju competed, taking home the bronze medal.
Playing in the elite event this year was current Women's World Chess Champion GM Ju Wenjun, Britain's youngest ever GM Shreyas Royal, as well as tournament winner (and all round great guy, not only because he annotated one of his games for this article) GM Gawain Jones.
A very happy birthday to @GMGawain - the winner of this year's @xtxmarkets London Chess Classic. We look forward to welcoming him back in 2025 to defend his title.
— London Chess Classic (@london_chess) December 11, 2024
Photo courtesy of @johnchess pic.twitter.com/MhOAvIyeqy
Walking into the venue for the first time, I was surprised at how few chessboards there were. I thought, you know, that there would be hundreds and hundreds of players, but I was literally sitting about 20 feet from Ju (although if you looked at both of our chessboards, you might have been convinced we weren't actually playing the same game after all). I will try my best not to make this article a Ju fan post, but I am only human.
In his final game of the round robin, Jones beat Ju with the white pieces to win the first-place prize of £25,000. It was also awarded the prize for best game:
Jones, who started as fifth seed, finished on 5/7, not losing a single game, followed by GM Michael Adams in second and GM Nikita Vitiugov in third. All three play for England, although Vitiugov is a new addition after emigrating from Russia last year. Many will be surprised that the three Brits beat rating favorites GM Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and GM Vidit Gujrathi for the prizes.
XTX Markets London Chess Classic Elite: Final Standings
Alongside the main tournaments were a number of simultaneous exhibitions, blitz tournaments, and children's events hosted by the charity Chess in Schools and Communities, which saw over 800 school children from all over Britain visiting London to celebrate chess. For many of the young chess fans, it was their first time in the English capital and, for some, their first time on a train.
As always, the organizers of the LCC ran the ProBiz Cup, a team chess event where GMs pair up with business leaders to play team chess. GM Adams and his teammate Neil Dickenson won this year with 2.5/3, beating GM Mamedyarov and Etan Ilfeld (inventor of diving chess!) on a tiebreak.
GM Luke McShane and GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (also known as MVL) joined the eight players competing in the elite event to take part in the Blindfold Challenge, playing against each other online with invisible pieces!
Mamedyarov, McShane, GM Andrew Hong, and MVL qualified for the knockout stages, where MVL took first place.
Congratulations to @Vachier_Lagrave on winning the Blindfold Challenge at the @xtxmarkets London Chess Classic! 🏆 🧠♟️
— London Chess Classic (@london_chess) December 8, 2024
The preparation has paid off. 💪🏻♟️ pic.twitter.com/WAqa0mfvhK
As one of the few players lucky enough to have bagged a ticket to enter the tournament—many were turned away due to space constraints—I was ready to play my first rated event since August. At the Maia Chess Festival earlier in 2024, I gained a healthy 20 Elo, beat players above my rating, and drew with players some hundred points above me. Perhaps this gave me unrealistic expectations because my opponents in London were nowhere near as squishy.
Of course, when I attend these tournaments, I come to create content. But that doesn't mean I don't also want to play good chess. The main difference as a chess player who streams her tournaments is that no matter what happens on the board, you still need to film a recap after the game and bare your soul and your horrible chess decisions to the world. There's no throwing away the scoresheet and pretending it never happened.
This is around my tenth ever classical chess tournament, which means that every single over-the-board game I play is primarily a learning experience. I'm frequently playing positions for the first time, and I don't have experience to fall back on. For me, classical chess has probably helped me more than anything else in improving my understanding of chess.
It is kind of a trial by fire, though. Especially when you accidentally move-order into an Open Sicilian, and you're playing against your first ever Hyperaccelerated Dragon and have a bunch of people watching your every blunder... but, all for the sake of the content, right? And yes, this actually happened in my ninth and final round of the London Chess Classic, where I was in contention for a women's prize but botched the whole thing and walked away only with a messy scoresheet and heavy cloaking feeling of shame for not having perfectly defended a difficult endgame.
I am, just like every chess player, my own worst critic. Of course, I can't expect myself to please Stockfish all the time (or even half of the time), yet I still yearn for its approval and for the vindicating feeling of seeing the turquoise double-exclam brilliancy sticker pasted next to a move I spent a long time calculating.
Somehow, I managed to get a seat at the London Chess Classic charity dinner, which aims each year to raise money for the Chess in Schools and Communities charity. During the main course of the dinner, grandmasters walk around playing simultaneous games against each table. I'll start by saying that this is not a brag except for the fact that it absolutely is, that our table beat the grandmasters—and that we were the first to do so.
The charity auction opened with two blitz games against none other than GM Magnus Carlsen, which went for £15,000 (personally, I would not pay any amount of money specifically to be thrashed by a chess player, Magnus or not) but the buyer ended up nominating British GM Luke McShane to play in his place.
Two blitz games with chess champ @MagnusCarlsen have just gone for £15,000 (!) at the XTX Markets London Chess Classic gala dinner for @schoolschess at The Dorchester. pic.twitter.com/LizmxCyjHA
— Leon Watson (@LeonWatson) December 9, 2024
Carlsen beat McShane 1.5-0.5, but both games were incredibly close. I'll include the PGN for the first game, which ended in a draw after Magnus was able to create a kind of fortress against the enemy queen:
I finished the tournament with a score of 50%, which would usually be enough to make me happy. I'm working really hard to be happy with it, even though one of those points came from a default because I keep telling myself that you can only play the games you get. If you ask me a week from now, maybe I will have finally convinced myself to be happy with the result.
Disappointingly, my two female friends and I received four defaults against the three of us throughout the event, which seemed like a lot. There's nothing the organizers can do except stop these players from enrolling next year, but it's a shame that people did this when others were turned away due to the tournament being oversubscribed.
As I didn't end up having a game for round eight, I was able to play in the final qualifier for the SuperBlitz. This was a nine-round 3+2 blitz tournament, where the top two performing players would get a spot in the main blitz event. Of course, I didn't qualify, and I got thrashed by some kids. For me, it was a reminder that 3+2 is a format that should only be played online, if at all (unpopular opinion, I know).
As the elite event of the LCC was only seven rounds to our nine, the players all competed in the side events, with the SuperBlitz being no exception. GM Alireza Firouzja flew over to compete in it and ended up winning the event!
XTX Markets London Chess Classic Super Blitz: Final Standings
My only regret of the tournament, other than not winning my games 9/9, is missing out on the commentary from legendary GM Peter Svidler and his cohost British IM Lawrence Trent.
In the end, I lost some of the points I gained in my last tournament, and I will probably end the year with an incredibly unremarkable Elo gain of +5, if that. If you asked me, however, if I've improved as a chess player in the last 12 months, the answer is a clear and resounding yes. I know it's only a matter of time until it is consistently reflected in the results.
I did what I came to do: compete, make content, and make new friends. I will not be quitting chess, despite what my clickbait YouTube title may say. I have new memories of playing chess in London, ones where I'm not 600 elo and only playing 1.b4! or the Caro-Kann. And so, whatever the numbers say, all of this should be enough. On the train home, I finally finished Intermezzo and was reminded that "there is more to life than great chess. Life itself [...] is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live."
London Chess Classic is over for another year♟️🎄🎁
— lula (@lularobs) December 7, 2024
… and I need to sleep for at least a week!
Thanks everyone who has been following along 🥰 pic.twitter.com/Ft9uRKUelZ
The London Chess Classic was a seven-round Round Robin with a time control of 90 minutes for the first 40 moves plus 30 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30-second increment from the first move. It was held from November 29 - December 6, 2024.
