Anand Retains Norway Chess title – at cooking
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The seventh edition of the Norway Chess tournament in Stavanger is no ordinary super-tournament.
Nowadays there are four or five events each year with a world class field (though few have fjords so close by the playing hall) but Norway Chess is the only one in which all the players are tested to their limits in a cooking competition.
Asking chessplayers to do something useful has been a stroke of genius by the Norway Chess organizers. Sure, between them the elite field assembled in Stavanger have multiple other sports and card and video games covered, but what happens when the chess world and the real world collide?
In the first real life experiment, in 2017, the Norway Chess players were asked to milk a cow and drive a tractor but this was deemed too esoteric and failure could be laughed off. Failure to be able to follow a recipe was another matter.
The first cooking contest, at Norway Chess 2018, saw the team of Viswanathan Anand and Ding Liren impress the judges and win the contest with their hollandaise sauce; a feat which was even more remarkable given that Ding had broken his hip cycling just before the cook-off and could only manage to chop vegetables while remaining seated. (Ding went into hospital that evening and after surgery withdrew from the tournament.)
GM Ding Liren. Photo: Cathy Rogers
This year, with the event now sponsored by a cooking equipment supplier, the degree of difficulty was upped considerably. Each pair of players was allocated a top chef – a candidate to represent Norway at the Bocuse d’Or, the World Championship of cooking – and asked to work as a team to produce a creative dish featuring salmon. The teams would be judged on taste, presentation and the more nebulous category teamwork.
The key ingredient was clearly chosen to assist World Champion Magnus Carlsen since it is well known that every Norwegian child learns to cook salmon, the national fish, by age 5. Curiously Carlsen seems to have forgotten everything he learned about cooking salmon, perhaps pushed out of his brain by the need for extra space to recover the Najdorf Variation, and he described the cooking contest as “one of the biggest challenges in my life.”
Team Grischuk/Carlsen. Photo: Cathy Rogers
After 15 minutes to plan the dish with their chef and then select ingredients from a fruit and vegetable truck, players had 45 minutes to produce a gourmet dish. If this sounds straightforward, imagine a Grandmaster playing a tandem game with two 1,200 players and you can visualize the potential frustration of the professional chef. As one of the Michelin starred judges said – one who is next week heading to China on a promotional tour for Norwegian salmon: “They [the GMs] don’t know what they are doing or what the final dish will be like, so they just have to execute what is asked of them.” (Fun fact – Stavanger, a city of fewer than 140,000 people, has two Michelin starred restaurants.)
Stavanger, Norway. Photo: Cathy Rogers
The 2018 winning team had been split up, with players forced to spend more time with their round three opponent. Thus Anand was teamed with Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Ding being appointed Fabiano Caruana as his partner. (Some feared the US-Chinese combination would produce a salmon burger with szechuan sauce but fortunately chef Marius Kjelsrud had other ideas.)
At first the omens did not look good for Team Anand/MVL. When asked by chef Filip Bendi to separate an egg and give him the yolk, Anand cracked an egg into a saucepan and then groped around to try to pull out the yolk. (MVL was then given the job, which he completed without drama.)
Team Anand/Vachier-Lagrave and the egg. Photo: Cathy Rogers
However other teams had their problems. Yu Yangyi needed a translator but she left him to his own devices halfway through the cook-off, since apparently his cooking level was the same whether he understood the instructions or not.
Yu’s compatriot Ding made a bid for a second hospital visit by chopping into his finger but, declaring it to be just a flesh wound, the world number three cooked on, eventually taking third place.
One feature of the chessplayers impressed the judges; their continuous and intense concentration on the task at hand. While there were plenty of self deprecating jokes, when asked to perform a task, simple or complex, the players set about it as if it was the most important thing in the world. Technique might have been lacking but application was never in doubt and all seemed genuinely proud of their creations.
When the judging panel finished their assessments, Anand, with MVL, had won again with a perfectly cooked salmon and vegetable dish.
The winning dish. Photo: Cathy Rogers
Jun 10, 2019
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#14
janb2008 wrote:
*snip* Asking chessplayers to do something useful has been a stroke of genius *snip*
Found that terribly funny. It's as if they'd been wasting their lives all along. 😂
Jun 10, 2019
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#15
Anand Retains Norway Chess title – at cooking
This implies anand held the cooking title there before
