London Chess Classic Round 6

London Chess Classic, Kensington Olympia, Mon 14 Dec

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With Kramnik beating Nigel Short and Carlsen only scraping a draw with Michael Adams, the gap was narrowed at the top of the table for the London Classic with one round to go. Using three points for a win and one for a draw rather than the traditional one point and half a point, the emphasis is very much on winning games and a succession of draws will keep you in the bottom half of the table.

In the auditorium the games begin with a flurry of opening moves in quick time while press photographers are still allowed to be on stage and so it's difficult to see what's happening until it all settles down after ten minutes.

Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian prodigy who might become the youngest World Champion ever reminds one of Stephen Hendry, slightly cherubic in a moody way but he stands up, moves around, does a yawning stretch and suddenly looks like Morrissey instead. He is the centre of attention and seems to know as much, and being World number one at 19 must be a difficult thing to carry off. More impressive is the surprisingly large Vladimir Kramnik, a civilised, confident and apparently affable giant of the game.

Hukari 'H-Bomb' Nakamura, the American Champion, has only used a minute of his time while David Howells playing him is already a quarter of an hour down. Nigel Short hasn't been having a good week and already seems to be struggling against Kramnik. Ni Hua and Luke McShane are going slowly and will need to speed up to meet the first time control. After an hour and a bit I go to the Commentary room where Daniel King and Laurence Trent amongst others are analysing the afternoon away.

This analysis seems to me to be quite wide of the mark sometimes. What they actually do is explore a dizzying variety of variations in each position, more or less playing their own games with the positions and not always by any means having much bearing on what happens on the real-life boards. They think Michael Adams' Knight on a6 against Carlsen is bad and they don't like Nakamura's pawn on g5 or anything else much about his position but it turns out that Adams has the better of a fairly obvious draw and Nakamura and Howells agree a draw once Howells proves he can make forty moves in two hours.

Nigel creates some interesting possibilities counter-attacking Kramnik but it never looked good for him and he goes off to get himself a glass of something red at about 6 o'clock. Carlsen certainly isn't winning but he wasn't going to lose either and so McShane and Ni Hua are left in the auditorium while the big noises generously show up in the commentary room to run through their games for the benefit of those who want to know what happened and why. There were missed chances, even perhaps a chance for Short to win so if they couldn't spot the best moves at the time, how were the rest of us supposed to follow it.

Kramnik is big and expansive, Short self-deprecating and goofy in his likeable, studious way. Then Carlsen and Adams are slightly less forthcoming but it looks as if Adams was never really worried, not about losing but not about winning either. One has to be cognisant of the fact that Magnus is only 19 but even now one can't help but wonder if his demeanour and immense reputation foreshadow some later life Tiger Woods, Agassi or Bjorn Borg-style crisis. One hopes not, of course, but it does seem hard for stratospherically talented young stars to keep it normal.

While Luke, newly admired by me after his superb pawn avalanche win in the previous round, was eventually losing a complicated game to the three times Chinese Champion, Viktor Korchnoi (pictured) was playing 26 other people all at once, lapping the inside of a quadrangle of tables making the moves for white while the opponents waited for him to arrive before showing him their move with black. He didn't pause for more than a second or so at most of the boards.

So, another immensely absorbing chess event. The novelty of it all at this level is a big part of its attraction for me, though, I think. It's a great insight into a strange world of people who habitually talk in sentences like 'yes, b4, Knight takes Bishop, Rook takes Knight, a3, Bishop h4, castle long and then perhaps something like c3 and it looks okay for black' as if they were born speaking that language.

In the same way that two or three days at a poetry conference make me want to run screaming back to the more primitive excitements of football while other delegates are still earnestly discussing whether the sonnet can be a feminist issue, I'm not sure that chess is really more than an occasional interest for me. I don't think it's going to provide the competitive enterprise to replace my other sports in later life. I can't get my Blitz rating at Free Internet Chess Server up to 1300 and that isn't very clever at all. I can see from the analysis by these experts that every move offers vast opportunities for the mistakes one loses by and against anybody any good you only need to do it once.

And if I can't look after a Queen's Bishop's Pawn any better than I can defend a train ticket then my future in the game isn't promising. This was intended as one of my bargain London days out with megatrain kindly selling me train rides for four pounds each way. But it is understood that you've still got your print out for the return journey. Not having it makes it look like you're a rascally fare dodger and it turns out that a single back from Waterloo, is in fact 27 pounds and 70 pence. I can show you the ticket to prove it. But it's only money.