How I Finally Played In A World Championship

After reporting on five previous world championships, I decided last year to finally play in one. The only problem? I really don't care for the extreme pressure and grind the players go through. OK there's a second problem. A small concern of about 500 missing rating points. Where did they go anyway?

So I did the next best thing and booked a ticket to Baden-Baden, Germany in August, 2024 for the Chess Tennis World Championship. Qualification process? 50 Euro. I can do that.

Baden-Baden is a spa town with a mostly geriatric tourist base, so it made me feel young again.

While there are other tournaments that combine the same two disciplines, organizer IM Jaroslav Srokovski explained to me that his was the first one to have an international player pool (it dates back to 2015). In fact several non-German acquaintances of mine had played previously. GMs Alexandra Kosteniuk and Pavel Tregubov (2022 champion) are regulars but couldn't make it this year, while IM Eric Rosen played in 2023. (Eric also didn't come this year, and as the lone American in 2024, I got called "Eric" several times. Despite this, no Stafford Gambits played.)

While it may seem weird to combine chess and tennis, it is not weirder to me than Chessboxing or Diving Chess. And as a bonus, the chances of concussion or the bends seemed a lot smaller.

The beautiful Rot-Weiss (Red-White) Tennis Club.

Here's the format: On Saturday, you play seven tennis matches to 10 points using roughly a Swiss system (with players from all over the world using different systems, "rating" one's tennis skill is not an exact science). If you win the match, you get a point. You have to win by two, so at 10-9, there is one more point, and if the trailing player manages to equal the score at 10, then the match ends tied and both players get a half-point, similar to a "draw" in chess.

Then on Sunday, you convene again in the morning, this time seated at the local chess club. Competitors then play seven games of chess at 15+0. Yes, this is the game in its simplified, caveman-like glory days. OTB and no increment. To the players' credit, I didn't see any messy time scrambles.

17-year-old FM Alexander Gschiel of Austria didn't find anyone close to his level in tennis. He went 7.0/7 in that portion. Ah, youth.

Then the scores are combined (total possible points: 14) and the four highest players trek back to the tennis courts for the semifinals and finals where the format changes (more on that later but if you only came for the finals video, I've got you covered). Most of the remaining field grabs a beer and sits on the terrace to watch the action.

My tournament actually began on Friday. Having never played on red clay before, I asked Srokovski if he wanted to practice with me. We played a few friendly matches at the host Rot-Weiss Tennis Club and I tried to remember all the clay-court advice that Wimbledon Doubles Champion and Chess.com regular Henry Patten had taught me: hit the ball high over the net, use more topspin, and play the angles.

But I quickly realized that I should have also taken Eric Rosen's advice to heart: buying clay-court specific shoes would have been advisable. I'm a baseliner at heart (well, that's the generous term; in truth I'm more of a pusher) and not used to all the sliding around. While it's good fun, I found myself "talking" to my feet to stop when trying to change directions. Instead, they react better to friction than to pleading. My feet mostly just kept grinding long contrails on the clay and taking me well out of the point.

Yours truly with organizer IM Jaroslav Srokovski, who still gets around the court great.

When the matches began the next day I made a few friends quickly and also chatted with some of the French contingent who I knew from my reporting gigs. Among them was GM Sebastian Mazé, a many-times Chess Tennis World Champion who I first met at the 2016 Olympiad in Baku, Azerbaijan (I somehow found myself hosting the French Team in their pre-party for the Bermuda Party thanks to my Marriott status and subsequent suite -- the French are great fun to hang out with).

As for the tennis, I struggled my way to 3.5/7 and that included a "bye" in one of the rounds. The good news? My back held out. I went into the event thinking I would score better in tennis than in chess, but luckily for me, I bounced back well the next day and learned I was still able to play some chess (I guess covering Magnus for a decade does have its unintended benefits).

One of my tennis opponents was Paul Rudd. Well, not really, but I did play his doppelgänger!

In the second round, I learned that making ChessKid videos also has unintended benefits. Crazily enough, I got to use the exact endgame idea that I had just made a ChessKid video about earlier that summer. With only a few seconds left on the clock, I saw that I could use "The Great Pawn Race" in real life!

My tournament kept right on rolling with more wins with some draws interspersed. I was going to need a really big score in the chess portion to make up for the poor tennis showing; in previous iterations one needed 9.0/14 to advance to the semifinals. Late in the tournament I faced the French IM Yovann Gatineau, a delightful young man who had beaten me the previous day on the clay. I was much worse out of the opening, but battled back to a winning position before declining his repetition late and then spectacularly self-mating:

While that ended my chances for advancement, the French were not done with me. In the final round, I faced Mazé, the highest-rated chess player in the event. We played a wildly fun game but I missed the study-like win late with the clock under one minute. Still, having two queens to one and grabbing a draw felt like a decent way to end my world championship.

With that, my world championship quest ended, but at least the missed win didn't cost me a top-four spot. In fact one needed 9.5/14 to qualify for the semifinals this year. I ended up with 4.5/7 in the chess section for a combined 8.0/14 and a tie for seventh with GM Fabien Libiszewski and CM Laurynas Zavekis.

Much like the most recent world championship, this world championship also had a heavy influence of the French.

After a quick lunch (no issues having the carb-heavy spatzle since my competition was now done) most players walked back to the tennis center to watch the semifinals and finals. The format now changed to something similar to chessboxing: players alternated between a giant chess set on one tennis court and actual tennis on the adjacent court. The time control of the chess game was 15+0 and players competed on the 64 squares for six minutes before pausing the game to play six points of tennis. The first to win in either discipline won the entire match (tennis matches were played to 18).

The terrace of the club's restaurant served as the grandstands for watching the finals.

Mazé took out his countryman Gatineau in one semifinal due to superior tennis skill while FM Alexander Gschiel of Austria, the #342-ranked junior tennis player in the world, overpowered Giorgi Davidov of Germany in both chess and tennis.

That set the stage for a classic chess vs. tennis finals. Mazé had about 200 more rating points than his 17-year-old opponent, but could he score enough points vs. Gschiel in tennis to finish him off in the chess match before he was doomed on the tennis court?

GM Sebastian Mazé serves to his countryman in the semifinals.

It turned out, Mazé had both the luck and the math. He won the first coin toss, and obviously chose chess as the opening discipline. But he also won the second coin toss and chose White. He told me after the event that he figured he needed to win at least one point in tennis. That would make sure that even if he trailed 17-1, he would get one more crack at the chess board.

GM Sebastian Mazé (White) vs. FM Alexander Gschiel in the finals.

As it turned out, he won the opening point in tennis, and Gschiel got ground down in the chess portion. The Austrian junior eventually took a commanding 14-4 lead in tennis but needed to find a way to last long enough in a losing ending to get back to tennis. However, Mazé had played quickly to ensure that there wasn't enough time on Gschiel's clock to do so, and the teenager never got a chance to serve again.

Thus Mazé collected another Chess Tennis World Championship title, his fourth. Afterward he bought a round of drinks for the French contingent and me (honorary Frenchman). He talked about adding another chess tennis event in 2025 to Bordeaux, this one with an even more robust social component. Something tells me we will be drinking during that contest and not after, and this is fine.

The winners of the event. Left to right: IM Jaroslav Srokovski (organizer/player), FM Alexander Gschiel, GM Sebastian Mazé, Giorgi Davidov, IM Yovann Gatineau. 

The event didn't inspire me to play more chess, but I did continue my travels to meet up with my friend/tennis coach, who happened to be living in Annecy, France for the summer. I got a tip that there was a majestic tennis court at about 2000m of elevation in the Swiss Alps. Armed with that, we took our racquets up the gondola, where our fellow hikers, instead laden with trekking poles and Camelbacks, look at us strange.

But we got the last laugh when we disembarked in the tiny hamlet of Murren, Switerland. Sure, our groundstrokes often went long in the thin air, and we still had the wrong shoes for clay, but we didn't care.