The end, sweet and bitter | TIME ONLINE

From the opening of the World Cup press center at College Holborn on Wednesday afternoon, all seats are already occupied and reporters overweights chess from around the world occupy the next room, where the spectators organize if not blitz games in the afternoons, if the fight of their heroes has sufficiently inspired them – or if they are bored, because they have already made a draw at fate.

Journalists push back chessboards and failures, unfold their laptops. Many live blogs. Even someone from La Repubblica is now here: Italy has noticed that there is a half-challenger in London a, the Italian-American Fabiano Caruana; at least you will not want to miss his victory if you missed his fight. Patriotism can be so cheap.

Many journalists, who have been there for three weeks, a little exhausted by the description of the twelve-part Aria Remix, decide not to go there the day of the decision next time. Because it distinguishes this 13th day from all the previous ones: the certainty that there will be a winner, even a winner in the general, who will or will remain world champion. Magnus Carlsen or Fabiano Caruana, it is a question of hours now.

Of course, the view of the match depends on your arrival or your start. Because you feel involuntarily in the struggle of these two young men there, who are preparing every month for several months on this World Cup, so depend on each one of them in a notoriously underfunded sport.

Being a world champion in chess, it's having taken care of yourself. Moreover, it is a title for eternity, whose charisma hardly diminishes, if at any given moment, an ex-husband gets up. Is Fabiano able to reach his goal in life? Can Magnus defend his title once more?

A challenger is more likely to be more motivated than his opponent, and Fabiano Caruana, who has had a year of great achievements, has been safer, turn after lap. It's his first World Cup. he must first face all the circumstances.

For Magnus Carlsen, it's the fourth fight. He lamented through the tournament, rough and devious, and in the end he only wanted to reach the dam, which had already prevailed two years ago New York against Sergei Karjakin, whom he had also been unable to defeat for more than twelve rounds. Magnus Carlsen has never lost a dam – if that does not speak for him!

On the other hand, the self-confidence, the calm, the will: Caruana, who is not as good as Carlsen, as evidenced by his results in tournament with fast and light chess, could succeed well that day. He receives the support of the former world champion Garry Kasparov, still world champion in the addition of unsolicited mustard, announcing a tweet, after the twelfth match at which Carlsen did not play, after "this shocking draw offer in top position with more time"Caruana is now his favorite because a dam requires huge nerves, and Magnus seems to lose them.

The public does not appear in such a crowd that day; why is not clear. Otherwise, there were half-hour shifts during which the spectators were exchanged. From now on, several places remain empty. If the organizers have increased entry fees, like two years ago in New York? We do not know it and we must not experience it in the tumult.

But at the beginning of the first fast game of the scene, it remains only to see the back of the photographers, who have their hands above the head with the cameras, because there are always photographers in front of them and others in front of them. In the last six World Cups, the interest of the media was not as important as here; This may be due in part to the American reporters, who are mainly interested in everything American and who, therefore, were not present in New York, where it would have been possible, because only Russian played against a Norwegian.

According to you, the audience on the net was perhaps less present than the last, perhaps because there was too much remisis to spark any enthusiasm or because the challenger still seemed too pale and the defending champion more attractive. Everyone knows his story.