Groningen 2026: When the Clock Became the Strongest Piece

Groningen, December 2026. The hall was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking. On the board the position had run out of theory; both players still had pieces, but neither had time. With thirty seconds left per move, their hands stayed steady while their eyes began to misread empty squares. The game ended on a move that, replayed on the board the next morning, the man who made it would have dismissed. Under this format, the winner is not necessarily the player who understands chess better — the winner is the one who handles time pressure better.

From 9 to 30 December 2026, FIDE staged the world championship final phase in Groningen, the Netherlands, under a format without precedent: 128 players, seven knockout rounds, each pairing playing two games at standard time control. If the scores were level after two games, fate was settled by rapid games. Reigning FIDE champion Anatoly Karpov was seeded directly into the final match in Lausanne, Switzerland, in January 2026. Whoever else wanted to sit opposite him had to survive seven rounds in Groningen.

2026 was the year world chess lived inside two parallel systems. Garry Kasparov held the number one ranking by rating and the title of a breakaway body, while the FIDE crown sat with Karpov. Two titles, two borders, two separate news feeds. Vietnamese fans who wanted to know who was strongest had to read two sources and reconcile them by hand. In May 2026, Kasparov lost to IBM's Deep Blue by 3.5–2.5 in New York, and from then on the question of human limits moved out of specialist journals and onto the sports pages.

I followed Groningen through sparse bulletins, foreign magazines bought from second-hand bookshops, and long-distance phone calls with a few friends working as coaches. My trade at the time was to sit at the board and describe what I saw, which forced me to separate two kinds of material: facts that can be looked up, and claims that exist only as the recollection of the people involved. At Groningen, most of the story belonged to the second kind.

What mattered most about the new format was that it completely changed how a player allocates energy. In classical chess a game runs five or six hours and can spill into the next day; time is an abundant resource, and accuracy of the move is what carries the highest price. In a two-game-then-rapid format, time becomes the scarcest resource of all. A player can calculate twelve correct moves in a row, but if those twelve moves devour forty minutes, he must play the remaining twenty without any capacity to check a single thing. Rapid chess does not reward the player who calculates best; it rewards the player who knows how much calculation is required.

The consequence is a different species of error. Classical errors usually come from knowledge: forgetting a line, misjudging a structure. Errors under clock pressure come from cognition: missing an intermediate move, failing to see an opponent's hanging piece, pressing the clock and only then realising you have moved into a controlled square. This kind of error does not vanish with strength. It shrinks only when a player accepts trading depth for safety.

Across the seven rounds in Groningen, most of the games that made noise were settled in their final phase, once both sides had left the territory they understood. I noticed a recurring pattern: young players tended to perform better in the first forty moves and collapse faster in the last twenty; veterans did the reverse. That is a sign that fitness and temperament had become part of the game rather than a footnote.

Another variable is rarely discussed: the draw. In a knockout system, the bracket determines half of a player's fate. Two players of equal strength — the one with the light half can travel two extra rounds, while the one in the heavy half must survive three consecutive rapid matches before reaching the inner rounds. The format was designed to make the game more watchable for audiences, and it succeeds, but it also injects into chess a random element that classical chess deliberately removed. Fans look at the bracket today and see fairness; professionals look at it and see luck.

Viswanathan Anand was the man who travelled that road all the way in Groningen to earn the right to face Karpov in Lausanne. But the tournament's story does not lie in the winner's name. It lies in this: to reach the final match, a player had to win more rapid games than in any classical event within the same span of days. That is a distinct skill, one that can be trained, and it does not fully overlap with the skill of playing classical chess.

Behind the format sits a governance question. FIDE keeps the right to write rules and award titles, while the money, the calendar and the image of the event sit with commercial partners. The boundary between the two is blurred, and every time the format changes, that boundary stretches a little further. The Deep Blue affair in May showed something similar at a different scale: when a private company sets the rules of play, those rules serve the television audience before they serve the people playing.

Looking towards Vietnam, the gap remains wide. Đào Thiên Hải, Vietnam's first grandmaster, is the pride of a generation, yet behind him there was not a deep enough layer of players to sustain a place in a world knockout. We lacked rated tournaments, lacked international arbiters, lacked even the news arriving fast enough for a young player to know where he stood on the map. The domestic scene in 2026 lived mainly on school tournaments and provincial clubs, where games were still written down by hand and kept in notebooks.

I am not surprised that many in the profession opposed the new format. A knockout allows a champion to be eliminated after two bad games, after a whole year of good ones. But seen from the stands, that format gives chess back something it had long lost: tension you can see with the naked eye. Spectators cannot read a twelve-move queen's rook endgame line. They can read the face of a man with four seconds left on his clock.

Every arena I have walked through has a hidden door, and the entrance is always a person. In Groningen that door was the clock. It said nothing, and it decided who walked on.

It took me three months to hear the whole story of those games in Groningen, while the bulletin gave them four lines. A record never grows old; it is only waiting for someone who knows how to listen. And as formats keep changing every few years, the one thing that does not change is the memory of the people who sat at the board that night. The question left for Vietnamese chess is not whether we can keep up with the new format, but whether we have anyone willing to sit down for three months and tell the next generation about a game that has already grown old.