They don't make the Angel of Death wear a suit.
The World’s Best Chess Player Just Stormed Out of a Tournament—Over a Pair of Pants
The World Rapid Chess Championships descended into farce after officials fined the world’s best player, Magnus Carlsen, for wearing jeans. He responded by quitting the event altogether.
By Joshua Robinson and Andrew Beaton, WSJ
Dec. 28, 2024 9:09 am ET
The pinnacle of chess has weathered its fair share of controversies in recent years, including a cheating dustup, geopolitical tension, and players’ bizarre complaints about creaky floors.
But this week, that list gained its strangest entry yet: Chess now has a pants controversy.
The biggest fashion faux pas this side of the Met Gala unfolded in lower Manhattan on Friday, when five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen arrived at the upscale Cipriani Wall Street, host of this year’s World Rapid Chess Championship, wearing something organizers considered utterly inappropriate. He was sporting a pair of jeans.
To FIDE, the game’s world governing body, this was as unacceptable as moving a pawn three spaces.
Denim, FIDE said, is “explicitly prohibited under longstanding regulations for this event” and promptly fined Carlsen, one of the greatest chess players of all time, $200 for his infraction. When the chief arbiter requested that Carlsen change his clothes, he declined to do so. And as a result, the 34-year-old grandmaster from Norway wasn’t assigned a match in the following round. It was chess’s equivalent of a one-game suspension.
Carlsen responded by quitting the tournament altogether—and then pulling out of the World Blitz Chess Championship, too.
“At that point, it became a bit of a matter of principle for me,” he said in an interview on his Take Take Take chess platform. “I’m too old at this point to care too much.”
Carlsen added that he’d been returning from a lunch meeting and barely had time to go back to his room, where he put on a shirt and jacket. He even threw on a different, dressier pair of shoes. But once the arbiter warned him about changing his trousers, Carlsen decided he’d had enough. Instead of arguing about pants, he figured he might as well spend his New Year’s somewhere warmer than freezing New York.
Later, Carlsen shared a photo of himself in the now infamous jeans captioned “OOTD” for “outfit of the day” and conducted an interview with a Norwegian outlet—in shorts.
The episode unleashed a torrent of criticism of FIDE from other players who took the opportunity to voice their frustration with a body that they view as hopelessly behind the times.
“I don’t think there’s a single player…who’s not going to watch the event because Magnus is playing in jeans or his underwear or a Speedo,” Carlsen’s fellow grandmaster and rival Hikaru Nakamura said on a livestream Friday evening. “They want to see Magnus Carlsen play chess. He’s the best player in the world and that’s that.”
FIDE insisted that the rules were the rules and applied “equally to all players.” Oddly enough, the kerfuffle over Carlsen’s jeans wasn’t the only wardrobe blunder at the championships on Monday. Earlier in the day, Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi was fined for showing up in “sports shoes,” FIDE said.
Unlike Carlsen, Nepomniachtchi complied with the arbiters, changing into approved footwear and saving his eyeroll at the rules for social media.
“The $200 fine will (hopefully) go to the Chess Fashion Research Foundation,” he wrote on X.
But behind the jokes lay a larger message about the fractured state of chess today. Since the recent explosion in prize money, platforms, and online tournaments—where old-school formalities such as dress pants don’t apply—top players are no longer as reliant on the stuffier events run by FIDE.
Carlsen, in particular, has nothing to prove. In addition to being widely considered the greatest classical player ever, he’s a five-time champion in rapid, and a seven-time winner in blitz. He is also likely the highest earner ever to play the game professionally, racking up millions in prize money and running an empire of chess apps and learning tools.
This is not the first time that Carlsen has turned his back on the game’s governing body either. In 2022, he announced that he wouldn’t defend his classical crown because he was no longer interested in the format of the world championship match.
“I simply feel that I don’t have a lot to gain,” he said at the time. “I don’t particularly like it.”
But that had more to do with the intensity and exhausting commitment that come with months of monastic preparation for a world championship match—not so much with his sartorial choices. Back then, the arbiters had no issues with him anyway.
When he claimed each of his five classical titles, Carlsen wore a suit.
Comments