Team Carlsen: Now We Know
Saturday, December 11, 2021 at 12:07PM
Dennis Monokroussos in 2021 World Chess Championship, Daniil Dubov, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Magnus Carlsen, Sergey Karjakin

There were really no surprises in this "reveal": Magnus Carlsen's team comprised all the usual suspects, with one new guy. Peter Heine Nielsen was the leader (which was already acknowledged by Carlsen during the match), and long-time assistants Laurent Fressinet (of "too weak, too slow" fame), Jan Gustafsson (since he was nowhere to be found on Chess24, everyone knew he was helping), and Daniil Dubov all helped out. The new guy was Jorden Van Foreest.

Of course, it's also pretty likely that there were other people who were helping in some capacity remotely, perhaps in a less official capacity. If so, we weren't given any information about that.

I'm not sure who was helping Nepo, other than Sergey Karjakin and Nepo's long-time coach Vladimir Potkin, so if any of you know please pass it along. About Karjakin: he was a bit tetchy about Dubov's assisting Carlsen. While the Ukrainian ex-pat seems more Catholic than the Pope when it comes to his love for Russia, and it should be remembered that Dubov has been helping Carlsen for years, I can see his being a little disappointed. It would have been disappointing to learn that, say, Nakamura or So had been helping Carlsen in his match with Caruana. On the other hand, Dubov, great though he is, is not a player on the level of Nakamura or So, or in the Russian context at the level of Karjakin or Grischuk. And, again, he had been working with Carlsen for years, I think even going back to the matches with Anand. So if it had been a player like Jeffery Xiong or Sam Shankland who had been helping Carlsen, and had been doing so for years at the time of the Caruana match, I'd have a harder time getting worked up about it. Maybe it would be nice if he sat that match out, but it seems to me that it would be going above and beyond for him to do so, rather than something he ought to do.

But maybe I'm wrong about this. And maybe it also depends on how tight or loose one sees the national community, if there are political aspects at stake (it wouldn't have been viewed kindly if there were "defectors" in the Spassky-Fischer match or the Karpov-Korchnoi matches, to put it mildly!). But as far as I'm aware there are no serious tensions between Russia and Norway, and it's not as if Nepomniachtchi is the golden boy of Russian chess, their one and only shining star in an otherwise chess-poor nation.

Anyway, some of my readers are Russian, and many of you are overseas and much closer to Russia than I am, and are bound to have better-informed ideas on this matter than I do. What do you think?

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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