The bookish central London enclave of Holborn is not the first place you might look for an intense sporting contest.
Yet here, amid the smattering of university buildings and barristers’ chambers, sits the College at Holborn, an event space that was once part of the celebrated Central St Martin’s College, which has played host to a sporting rivalry keenly anticipated by one community in particular.
Through mid-November this has been the battleground for the World Chess Championship match between the two best players around: Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana of the USA.
As sedate and cerebral as chess may appear, high stakes and razor-thin margins for error have always lent the world championship an air of psychological intensity – a reputation crystallised in the most famous final of all, a Cold War encounter between the brilliant American Bobby Fischer and Soviet champion Boris Spassky in 1972. This year’s edition may not have that kind of intrigue to draw upon but organiser World Chess, which promotes the closing stages of the competition on behalf of global governing body FIDE, still hopes it can capture the imagination.
Carlsen and Caruana have been scheduled to play 12 games of several hours apiece across a gruelling two-week period, with faster-paced tiebreak rounds available if they cannot be separated after that. Carlsen is the best player in world chess. Having endorsed the likes of G-Star, Porsche and water brand Isklar, he is also its biggest breakout star since Garry Kasparov, the Russian genius who at his peak had no human equal – his preeminence infamously punctured only by IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a 1997 landmark for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). In world number two Caruana, however, Carlsen has so far met his match. The opening 11 games produced 11 draws.
SportsPro went to the World Chess Championship final to meet World Chess president Ilya Merenzon
Back in Norway, hundreds of thousands have followed proceedings on free-to-air television channel NRK, with fans elsewhere tuning into World Chess’ own pay-per-view platform or tracking moves via digital boards. In Holborn, the 450-seat theatre has been sold out for every session, with spectators also cycling through the bar, café and official shop, or perhaps getting in a game of their own.
In the VIP section, guests watch developments unfold on any of half a dozen big-screen televisions while they sip coffees or Beluga vodka cocktails and play on boards arranged across the room. It is here that SportsPro meets World Chess president Ilya Merenzon to discuss the work that has gone into the event and that which lies ahead; how the organisation will leverage technology, digital connectivity and canny marketing to reunite a massive global community, and convince brands of the value in an ancient game being retooled for the 21st century.
What’s the commercial concept that you’ve worked up for this event in London? What are you trying to achieve with it?
Well, we are in the business of developing and monetising chess, so we are using all our artillery. We’re shooting from all the cannons we can. And basically, the model involves five vectors of revenue, ranging from tickets to online pay-per-view, to advertising to sponsorship, to merchandising and to media rights. So we’re using all of it and it’s basically up to us whether it’s going to be very, very successful or not successful at all.
Let’s look at the sponsorship angle first. What kind of a showcase do you think a World Chess Championship provides for partners?
I genuinely think that chess is maybe the most under-appreciated sport in terms of sponsorship in the business because the pricing and cost of contact is so far lower than anything you could expect compared to anything else. It’s like a diamond in the rough.
Having said that, we also need to understand that sponsorship in any sport or in any business is a huge effort by both the sponsoree and the sponsor. So the case is phenomenal, but it so much depends on the sponsor how to promote it and how to monetise it and how to build on it.
I’ll give you two examples. Kaspersky is an obvious partner because they are in the digital space, just like chess, and to showcase the fact that they are actually securing the championship is pretty spectacular. But also, they have substantial B2B plans and their sales are mainly B2B – or at least substantially B2B. So they’re using it also as a B2B opportunity.
World Chess is exploring a number of new commercial strategies to maximise exposure for the sport during the World Championship final
Another example would be the pens by SD Du Pont, where we partnered with them and they produced special World Chess Championship pens which are used by the players. They also did a limited edition which was sold out in a few hours.
They have three partnerships: one is with chess, the other is with 007, and the third is with Star Wars. And I was very, very happy that we signed up because we wanted to see how we would act on a retail level and it worked out really, really well. But they put a lot of work into producing limited editions, marketing and selling it, and delivering it.
It’s kind of a part of the news cycle.
Can you name the world champion in fencing? Can you name the world champion in curling? There are only a few sports in each country where you can kind of name the top people, but on an international level there are only very, very few – maybe one or two tennis players, one swimmer, maybe a boxer or MMA, and a chess player. It’s a very, very elite group of people and all the other sports I mentioned are by far more expensive.
Commercially speaking, would you consider yourself to be working more in the sports space or the cultural space?
Actually, that’s the debate we’re having almost every day, when we drink wine. In terms of top events like this one, it’s definitely a sports event. There is no question. But the magic of chess is that it also kind of exists in the cultural space and entertainment space and political space.
When these events are not taking place, then it’s definitely a culture. It’s a little bit of a hybrid between a computer game, the Nobel Prize and a visit to a church. So you have to actually position it in all these verticals.
It’s a little bit of a hybrid between a computer game, the Nobel Prize and a visit to a church
World Chess president Ilya Merenzon
What’s the experience that you’ve set up in the arena?
We actually studied, in great detail, how people want to visit a chess event, and it was a real adventure for us. Because first of all, we thought that they’d really want to see the players, which is not the case. They are interested to be able to say that they saw the players but that’s mainly for a selfie-driven experience; they’re not interested in seeing them all the time.
Then we thought, maybe they want to play themselves. So we set up this area where they can play. Maybe they wanted to listen to commentary, so we set up this amazing commentary.
But in reality, they really want to play against Magnus and Fabiano. This is what their main goal is. So we tried to set up the experience so it kind of feels as close as this. There are teams of players – their father, their trainer, their coach – in the venue. That’s what we wanted to shoot for.
In Europe, for example, we’d set up separate rooms for the teams, and they’d been sitting in those rooms being nervous. And now they can’t. Not because we don’t have enough room, but because we really wanted them to be with the people so they can see their reaction, listen to them discuss it. This is what people really want. And imagine coming up to the father of Magnus Carlsen or the manager of Fabiano Cuarano and discussing the game while the game is taking place. This is the experience.
So we set up different kinds of things, and it looks a little bit like a multi-layered experience, and that’s why people are spending more than four or five hours per day here.
Menezon says that chess is an under-appreciated sport in terms of sponsorship
Away from the venue, what strategies have you come up with to bring people into the action digitally and replicate that experience?
You know what, when I started working on chess, I was trying to define my job. And my job, I thought, was to make chess interesting.
I was completely failing in that until I realised that it’s an absolutely dumb approach because the audience of chess is so big anyway that making it more interesting is going to only marginally affect it. It’s already a billion people or more so why would I want to increase it – it’s already huge, it’s already bigger than pretty much any sport you can imagine. More people play chess than there are subscribers to Kim Kardashian’s Twitter, so it’s a very big audience.
So our goal was to give these people the product, because there is this audience so let’s give them something they want. So we’re trying to engage them on very different levels, like introducing emoji into broadcasts – there are people who are completely oblivious to chess notation, but they understand what the turtle is or the skull. This by far was the most turtle-intensive tournament ever…
But we’re also doing designed merchandise. Our design partner is Pentagram, which is famous for doing amazing stuff. They did the design of Tiffany’s and Chase Bank and stuff like that. So imagine these creative geniuses pondering over the best design of chess sets. It is pretty spectacular. We have leather ones, I think they proposed snake ones – we’ll see about the snake.
Acting on the digital platforms, we have this app called Mates which is based on dating. We did a chess version of Tinder where you choose your opponent, and if there is a match you can meet them for an hour to play chess – which was phenomenally successful. We were surprised. Now people are actually using it all over the world. We discovered that there was an issue with finding a partner – you can easily do it online and you absolutely cannot do it over a board. So in case you are sitting here and you really want to play with somebody, now there is an app.
We just launched it a couple of days before the championship and we had over 200,000 downloads, so it’s pretty big. Of course, it’s not millions, but we haven’t started promoting it heavily. It’s been there for only a week, but we know that a huge number of other sports came to us saying, ‘Hey guys, can we add football or tennis to this thing?’
We also introduced pay-per-view – which is a big deal because in chess, you never had to pay for anything. It was a very free experience. So we are trying to make it as commercial as possible and we are just adding chess to the roster of sports which are using pay-per-view to huge success. Of course, there are people who hate us for this specific reason but we’re not trying to be liked by everyone; we’re trying to build it in a sustainable, commercial, long-term way.
We know for sure that chess is going to be the main driver of chess in the future but of course people are a little bit reluctant to pay for something they used to get for free. But if you don’t make it sustainable, then you can’t have events in London – you will have them in places where you really don’t want to have them.
What’s the strategy been for building the championship final? In Magnus Carlsen you have a figure with a lot of mainstream media cut through. What’s your approach been to exploiting that?
We introduced this logo a year ago, which became a huge instant Instagram moment where they called it Kama Sutra – which was nice. But it’s not only that. Basically, there is a cycle which is culminating in the championship, so everybody is curious who’s going to be the semi-finalists and who’s going to be the finalists. So it’s been building up, effectively, and our job was to promote it in the sense of having the best events possible so that people would get excited even about the semi-finals.
And we couldn’t be happier with the result, just because it’s number two against number one. It’s maybe the closest chess has ever got to Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier. You can’t even think about this. For example, the last championship, which was also quite big, number one was playing number nine, so there was not too much suspense even though the games were very aggressive and the chess was beautiful. Nobody was questioning the result. Now everybody is questioning the result, and therefore the atmosphere and the drama is a substantial part of the sport.
But come on, it’s a sport. It’s not a kindergarten. There is real drama and I think it’ll just increase.
Magnus Carlsen is chess' poster boy and World Chess are out to take advantage of his profile
We don’t need to talk about machine learning and AI in chess as though it’s a new topic – but what role will technologies like that have in the future of chess?
There is actually a Magnus Carlsen app [where you can play against a version of him]. And I think this is the way that chess and other sports will go into – learning. I’m definitely sure – and if nobody does it in the next three months, we will do it – there will be a personal trainer which will be AI-based.
I think it’s the same with the French language or wine skills. Individual learning is amazingly advanced and you can make it even more advanced, and chess is a perfect sandbox for this. But if we develop this tool then we’ll definitely sell it to all other subjects on can think of, ranging from flying lessons to insomnia.
With all of that in mind, what’s the potential for chess in the next few years?
Even now, I think it’s very, very big. You know, it can be a billion-dollar business but anything can be a billion-dollar business and most things are a billion-dollar business
In terms of potential, it’s amazing. And the fact that it’s maybe the last under-developed sport, the oldest sport was kind of completely forgotten. So I’m glad that lots of people and companies are now entering this space and developing really cool stuff ranging from robots to drones.
The bookish central London enclave of Holborn is not the first place you might look for an intense sporting contest.
Yet here, amid the smattering of university buildings and barristers’ chambers, sits the College at Holborn, an event space that was once part of the celebrated Central St Martin’s College, which has played host to a sporting rivalry keenly anticipated by one community in particular.
Through mid-November this has been the battleground for the World Chess Championship match between the two best players around: Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana of the USA.
As sedate and cerebral as chess may appear, high stakes and razor-thin margins for error have always lent the world championship an air of psychological intensity – a reputation crystallised in the most famous final of all, a Cold War encounter between the brilliant American Bobby Fischer and Soviet champion Boris Spassky in 1972. This year’s edition may not have that kind of intrigue to draw upon but organiser World Chess, which promotes the closing stages of the competition on behalf of global governing body FIDE, still hopes it can capture the imagination.
Carlsen and Caruana have been scheduled to play 12 games of several hours apiece across a gruelling two-week period, with faster-paced tiebreak rounds available if they cannot be separated after that. Carlsen is the best player in world chess. Having endorsed the likes of G-Star, Porsche and water brand Isklar, he is also its biggest breakout star since Garry Kasparov, the Russian genius who at his peak had no human equal – his preeminence infamously punctured only by IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a 1997 landmark for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). In world number two Caruana, however, Carlsen has so far met his match. The opening 11 games produced 11 draws.
Back in Norway, hundreds of thousands have followed proceedings on free-to-air television channel NRK, with fans elsewhere tuning into World Chess’ own pay-per-view platform or tracking moves via digital boards. In Holborn, the 450-seat theatre has been sold out for every session, with spectators also cycling through the bar, café and official shop, or perhaps getting in a game of their own.
In the VIP section, guests watch developments unfold on any of half a dozen big-screen televisions while they sip coffees or Beluga vodka cocktails and play on boards arranged across the room. It is here that SportsPro meets World Chess president Ilya Menenzon to discuss the work that has gone into the event and that which lies ahead; how the organisation will leverage technology, digital connectivity and canny marketing to reunite a massive global community, and convince brands of the value in an ancient game being retooled for the 21st century.
What’s the commercial concept that you’ve worked up for this event in London? What are you trying to achieve with it?
Well, we are in the business of developing and monetising chess, so we are using all our artillery. We’re shooting from all the cannons we can. And basically, the model involves five vectors of revenue, ranging from tickets to online pay-per-view, to advertising to sponsorship, to merchandising and to media rights. So we’re using all of it and it’s basically up to us whether it’s going to be very, very successful or not successful at all.
Let’s look at the sponsorship angle first. What kind of a showcase do you think a World Chess Championship provides for partners?
I genuinely think that chess is maybe the most under-appreciated sport in terms of sponsorship in the business because the pricing and cost of contact is so far lower than anything you could expect compared to anything else. It’s like a diamond in the rough.
Having said that, we also need to understand that sponsorship in any sport or in any business is a huge effort by both the sponsoree and the sponsor. So the case is phenomenal, but it so much depends on the sponsor how to promote it and how to monetise it and how to build on it.
I’ll give you two examples. Kaspersky is an obvious partner because they are in the digital space, just like chess, and to showcase the fact that they are actually securing the championship is pretty spectacular. But also, they have substantial B2B plans and their sales are mainly B2B – or at least substantially B2B. So they’re using it also as a B2B opportunity.
Another example would be the pens by SD Du Pont, where we partnered with them and they produced special World Chess Championship pens which are used by the players. They also did a limited edition which was sold out in a few hours.
They have three partnerships: one is with chess, the other is with 007, and the third is with Star Wars. And I was very, very happy that we signed up because we wanted to see how we would act on a retail level and it worked out really, really well. But they put a lot of work into producing limited editions, marketing and selling it, and delivering it.
It’s kind of a part of the news cycle.
Can you name the world champion in fencing? Can you name the world champion in curling? There are only a few sports in each country where you can kind of name the top people, but on an international level there are only very, very few – maybe one or two tennis players, one swimmer, maybe a boxer or MMA, and a chess player. It’s a very, very elite group of people and all the other sports I mentioned are by far more expensive.
Commercially speaking, would you consider yourself to be working more in the sports space or the cultural space?
Actually, that’s the debate we’re having almost every day, when we drink wine. In terms of top events like this one, it’s definitely a sports event. There is no question. But the magic of chess is that it also kind of exists in the cultural space and entertainment space and political space.
When these events are not taking place, then it’s definitely a culture. It’s a little bit of a hybrid between a computer game, the Nobel Prize and a visit to a church. So you have to actually position it in all these verticals.
What’s the experience that you’ve set up in the arena?
We actually studied, in great detail, how people want to visit a chess event, and it was a real adventure for us. Because first of all, we thought that they’d really want to see the players, which is not the case. They are interested to be able to say that they saw the players but that’s mainly for a selfie-driven experience; they’re not interested in seeing them all the time.
Then we thought, maybe they want to play themselves. So we set up this area where they can play. Maybe they wanted to listen to commentary, so we set up this amazing commentary.
But in reality, they really want to play against Magnus and Fabiano. This is what their main goal is. So we tried to set up the experience so it kind of feels as close as this. There are teams of players – their father, their trainer, their coach – in the venue. That’s what we wanted to shoot for.
In Europe, for example, we’d set up separate rooms for the teams, and they’d been sitting in those rooms being nervous. And now they can’t. Not because we don’t have enough room, but because we really wanted them to be with the people so they can see their reaction, listen to them discuss it. This is what people really want. And imagine coming up to the father of Magnus Carlsen or the manager of Fabiano Cuarano and discussing the game while the game is taking place. This is the experience.
So we set up different kinds of things, and it looks a little bit like a multi-layered experience, and that’s why people are spending more than four or five hours per day here.
Away from the venue, what strategies have you come up with to bring people into the action digitally and replicate that experience?
You know what, when I started working on chess, I was trying to define my job. And my job, I thought, was to make chess interesting.
I was completely failing in that until I realised that it’s an absolutely dumb approach because the audience of chess is so big anyway that making it more interesting is going to only marginally affect it. It’s already a billion people or more so why would I want to increase it – it’s already huge, it’s already bigger than pretty much any sport you can imagine. More people play chess than there are subscribers to Kim Kardashian’s Twitter, so it’s a very big audience.
So our goal was to give these people the product, because there is this audience so let’s give them something they want. So we’re trying to engage them on very different levels, like introducing emoji into broadcasts – there are people who are completely oblivious to chess notation, but they understand what the turtle is or the skull. This by far was the most turtle-intensive tournament ever…
But we’re also doing designed merchandise. Our design partner is Pentagram, which is famous for doing amazing stuff. They did the design of Tiffany’s and Chase Bank and stuff like that. So imagine these creative geniuses pondering over the best design of chess sets. It is pretty spectacular. We have leather ones, I think they proposed snake ones – we’ll see about the snake.
Acting on the digital platforms, we have this app called Mates which is based on dating. We did a chess version of Tinder where you choose your opponent, and if there is a match you can meet them for an hour to play chess – which was phenomenally successful. We were surprised. Now people are actually using it all over the world. We discovered that there was an issue with finding a partner – you can easily do it online and you absolutely cannot do it over a board. So in case you are sitting here and you really want to play with somebody, now there is an app.
We just launched it a couple of days before the championship and we had over 200,000 downloads, so it’s pretty big. Of course, it’s not millions, but we haven’t started promoting it heavily. It’s been there for only a week, but we know that a huge number of other sports came to us saying, ‘Hey guys, can we add football or tennis to this thing?’
We also introduced pay-per-view – which is a big deal because in chess, you never had to pay for anything. It was a very free experience. So we are trying to make it as commercial as possible and we are just adding chess to the roster of sports which are using pay-per-view to huge success. Of course, there are people who hate us for this specific reason but we’re not trying to be liked by everyone; we’re trying to build it in a sustainable, commercial, long-term way.
We know for sure that chess is going to be the main driver of chess in the future but of course people are a little bit reluctant to pay for something they used to get for free. But if you don’t make it sustainable, then you can’t have events in London – you will have them in places where you really don’t want to have them.
What’s the strategy been for building the championship final? In Magnus Carlsen you have a figure with a lot of mainstream media cut through. What’s your approach been to exploiting that?
We introduced this logo a year ago, which became a huge instant Instagram moment where they called it Kama Sutra – which was nice. But it’s not only that. Basically, there is a cycle which is culminating in the championship, so everybody is curious who’s going to be the semi-finalists and who’s going to be the finalists. So it’s been building up, effectively, and our job was to promote it in the sense of having the best events possible so that people would get excited even about the semi-finals.
And we couldn’t be happier with the result, just because it’s number two against number one. It’s maybe the closest chess has ever got to Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier. You can’t even think about this. For example, the last championship, which was also quite big, number one was playing number nine, so there was not too much suspense even though the games were very aggressive and the chess was beautiful. Nobody was questioning the result. Now everybody is questioning the result, and therefore the atmosphere and the drama is a substantial part of the sport.
But come on, it’s a sport. It’s not a kindergarten. There is real drama and I think it’ll just increase.
We don’t need to talk about machine learning and AI in chess as though it’s a new topic – but what role will technologies like that have in the future of chess?
There is actually a Magnus Carlsen app [where you can play against a version of him]. And I think this is the way that chess and other sports will go into – learning. I’m definitely sure – and if nobody does it in the next three months, we will do it – there will be a personal trainer which will be AI-based.
I think it’s the same with the French language or wine skills. Individual learning is amazingly advanced and you can make it even more advanced, and chess is a perfect sandbox for this. But if we develop this tool then we’ll definitely sell it to all other subjects on can think of, ranging from flying lessons to insomnia.
With all of that in mind, what’s the potential for chess in the next few years?
Even now, I think it’s very, very big. You know, it can be a billion-dollar business but anything can be a billion-dollar business and most things are a billion-dollar business
In terms of potential, it’s amazing. And the fact that it’s maybe the last under-developed sport, the oldest sport was kind of completely forgotten. So I’m glad that lots of people and companies are now entering this space and developing really cool stuff ranging from robots to drones.
