Up those stairs, in a decadent auditorium, beneath a painted ceiling, grand masters Miguel Santos and Jose Gascon provided live, Spanish-language commentary. In a room that could easily hold a hundred, perhaps two dozen spectators in gold velvet chairs listened attentively. The players had arrived and quickly began to play in a closed room down the hall.

At this level, a chessboard is a particle accelerator, powerful and productive, spitting out ideas from a violent clash.

The Candidates is a double round-robin; 14 rounds take place over 18 days, each player facing each other with both the white and black pieces.

Nepomniachtchi, the solidly built Russian, was facing Teimour Radjabov, the ruggedly handsome Azerbaijani. Caruana, the sparrow-like American, battled Jan-Krzysztof Duda, the young, clean-cut Pole (no relation to the Polish president). Ding Liren, the greatest player in the history of China, played Richard Rapport, the beguiling and creative Hungarian. And Hikaru Nakamura, the American speed-chess specialist and YouTube personality, played Alireza Firouzja, a baby-faced, 19-year-old French-Iranian prodigy.

Fittingly for this international summit, chess is at home in Spain. The game has undergone dramatic changes in its 1500-year history, some of them instigated here.

One theory holds that the queen, the most powerful piece in the modern game, got those powers in honour of Isabella of Castile. She rises in bronze monuments above Madrid. And 16th-century priest Ruy Lopez de Segura, from the south-western hills of this country, authored an influential treatise on the game, Arte del Juego del Axedrez, expounding on the best opening moves. Centuries later, the Ruy Lopez opening, also known as the Spanish Game, remains a prominent strategy.

Among many games, chess in particular is more effective than any other in many ways, Lopez wrote in 1561. It is a game of science and seems not to be a dishonest pastime.

Arkady Dvorkovich, president of FIDE, at the opening of this years Candidates tournament.Getty

The world chess champion is Magnus Carlsen, 31, of Norway. Hes held the title since 2013, has ranked No. 1 in the world since 2011 and lays a strong claim to being the greatest chess player ever. Hes the closest thing the game has to a celebrity; with strong-jawed good looks, hes modelled alongside Liv Tyler and appeared on a Cosmopolitan magazine sexiest-man list. Its Carlsen, demigod of the modern game, Mozart of chess, who the eight Candidates were striving to dethrone.

But Carlsen is bored. He is, evidently, so lonely at the top of this game that he announced in July he wont bother defending his title. He had said that he would play only if Firouzja, forerunner of the next generation, won the Candidates.

Perhaps it was an old ploy, like a prizefighter refusing to box, holding out for a bigger purse. Perhaps he was tired; the world championship, its format and the preparation it demands are a lengthy grind. Perhaps he was having a laugh. Perhaps he was trying to write history, orchestrating, at worst, a transfer of the mantle to a new wunderkind. Or perhaps Carlsen is truly happy with his achievements, content with life beyond chess.

Whatever the reason, he is not like other chess players. We are miserable, Anish Giri, a top player, told Chess.com, referring to mere mortal grand masters. Carlsen is beyond that.

With the title now vacant, Russian Nepomniachtchi will play Ding of China for the top ranking.

No one but Carlsen knew if Carlsen would play, and that uncertainty hung over the Candidates and its toiling miserables like a noxious fog. In a sense, it was unclear what they were all playing for. What good is winning the Candidates if the champion then simply steps aside, like a matador dodges a bull? By rule, if the reigning champion declines to defend his crown, the first- and second-place Candidates play for the world title.

There are metapolitics governing chess politics. The world championship and the Candidates fall under the auspices of Fide (pronounced fee-day), chesss international governing body. For more than two decades, until 2018, Fide was run by a Russian named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the former president of the Republic of Kalmykia. Ilyumzhinov is on record saying hes been abducted by aliens and that chess is a gift from extraterrestrial civilisations. He was sanctioned by the US in 2015 and barred from entering the country for his financial support of Bashar al-Assads regime in Syria.

Nowadays, Fide is run by a Russian named Arkady Dvorkovich, a former deputy prime minister who chaired the organising committee for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. About the war, Dvorkovich told Mother Jones magazine, My thoughts are with Ukrainian civilians. He was later quoted in Russian media saying that the main thing is that a solid peace and a more just order will finally be established on our planet, where theres no place for Nazism or the domination of some countries over others, apparently adopting the Putin line that Ukraine needed to be denazified.

When asked by chess24.com, a popular news site, if he was close with the Kremlin regime, he said, I was before 2018, but not after that. I can call, but I dont use it.

Chess has long been a proud Russian national sport, right up there with ice hockey, ballet and novel writing. Soviet players dominated the game in the 20th century, comprising a string of world champions interrupted only briefly by American Bobby Fischer at the height of the Cold War in 1972.

But while one Russian was leading the Candidates, another famous Russian was missing from Madrid. Sergey Karjakin, who challenged Carlsen in 2016, was banned from chess for six months for his public support of Russias invasion into Ukraine. A Fide disciplinary commission found that his statements damage the reputation of the game of chess...The likelihood that these statements will damage the reputation of Sergey Karjakin personally is also considerable. His absence opened a spot for Ding, the Chinese world No. 2.

There will be a Fide presidential election this month. Ukrainian-born Andrey Baryshpolets is running on a ticket with Carlsens coach, Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish grand master. Baryshpolets circulated a petition arguing that the Russian Federation has been using Fide as a soft power to whiten its reputation. It continues to do so amid its military aggression against Ukraine.

The world championship is slated for early next year. No dates or host city have yet been announced.

Only one woman, Judit Polgar, has ever played in the Candidates, most recently in 2007.Getty

Most spectators at the Candidates never see the players playing chess, at least not in person. So sensitive are the players to distraction, and so demanding of attention is their game, that they play in a sort of quarantine. The venue proved an effective barrier against all rumblings of the world outside; neither the NATO summit nor the war beyond were hot topics. The hallways leading to their sanctum were always closely guarded, and signs lining the corridors ordered silencio.

Nevertheless, devotees streamed into the palace, up the gilded stairway and through stately rooms. The commercial advertising on display spoke to a transformed game from stodgy old pastime to rising e-sport and grist for the content mill.

At a ChessKid booth, staffers were discussing outreach efforts to mommy bloggers. Chessable was hawking its online education service, which includes a $US250 ($358) video course on the intricacies of the Spanish Game. Anna Cramling, a 20-year-old internet personality with grand master parents and 217,000 followers on Twitch, was livestreaming, walking backwards to face her cameraman.

I was extended an invitation into the inner sanctum where the games are played by a Fide official. I was asked to put my phone in a lockbox before passing through a heavy curtain and a glass door. The room was surprisingly small and sparsely populated only the players, me and my Fide minder, and a couple of arbiters from Fide, immaculately suited.

On the arbiters table sat a thick stack of scoresheets, on which the players write down every move played using something called algebraic notation, and a pile of spare chess clocks. Time was ample but strictly controlled. Candidates get two hours for their first 40 moves, an hour for the next 20 and 15 minutes and 30 seconds a move for anything after that.

The room was deathly quiet, only the hum of air-conditioning and the occasional creak of very old floor. (Id already been scolded for taking a work call two floors above the playing room. At some tournaments, players sit in a soundproof glass cage.) And it was incredibly bright; a metal lattice on the ceiling supported many powerful lights. They illuminated the subtly high-tech chessboards and pieces, with electronic sensors embedded inside, which broadcast their positions live to the world.

A large black backdrop had been installed behind the four players tables, covering what appeared to be a bucolic hunting mural. It displayed the tournaments sponsors, most prominently Chess.com, El Pas and Scheinberg Family, the last of which includes the billionaire founders of PokerStars, an online card room.

Chess.com, a news site that also hosts online games, wielded an outsize influence over the proceedings, dominating the press corps, producing broadcasts on site and conducting official post-game interviews. (Many pizzas were delivered to the pressroom one afternoon; while helping myself to a slice I was told, curtly, Thats Chess.coms.)

The players came in a bold palette of dress-shirt hues, blues, purples, pinks. (Only one woman, Judit Polgar, has ever played in the Candidates, most recently in 2007.) They sat in high-back (very high-back) office chairs which were the butt of many jokes at the tournament.

The players arent constrained to their chairs; they can wander around, observe each others games, grab snacks, use the toilet. This wandering happens often, and its not uncommon for neither player to be sitting at a given game. With blazers hung on the backs of the tall chairs, this sometimes gave the impression of a match taking place between two invisible competitors.

In a dim, private side room, suitable for breaks and nervous pacing, a TV displayed the live positions of the games. Players would wander in, becoming illuminated solely by the blue glow of their own chess.

Placards were affixed to each table with players Elo ratings a statistical calculation quantifying a players strength (Caruana = 2783, Nepomniachtchi = 2766) and their national flags, except for Nepomniachtchi, who played under the generic Fide flag. (Its motto: Gens una sumus, we are one people.)

The grand masters moved their pieces with the nimble and elegant motions of a concert pianist. And while they could easily play their games blindfolded, chess positions being like language to them, their eyes darted around the board like a hawks at altitude. Occasionally, they closed their eyes, searching, it seems, for a higher dimension of thought. There is also a near-universal tendency to fiddle with captured pieces.

After a few minutes, my Fide minder left the room, leaving me alone with the Candidates. I stayed for another half-hour, staring at the pieces and the players. Occasionally, they stared back at me. It was an uncomfortably zoological experience.

Worse, as the players got stuck deep into complex middlegames and endgames, clinging to positional edges and pawns like a free-solo climber clings to a ledge, their clocks ticking and tournament lives on the line, it was like watching people being tortured.

Much of the action in the room was inscrutable, though the temptation to engage in pseudo-scientific body-language analysis was strong.

It seemed easy to tell how Caruana was playing. When things were going well, he perched above the board, perfectly still and alert. When they werent, he fidgeted, shifting from perch to perch. This day, Caruana was shifting. Nepomniachtchi, meanwhile, was unflappable, both in chess performance and demeanour. Im just trying to keep my head calm and not let any emotions drive me, hed said before the game. Im just trying to do my job, more or less.

Ding Liren, the greatest player in the history of China, left, faces Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi last year.

The octet of Candidates had been preparing for six months or more. As well as the glory, there is healthy prize money: 48,000 ($71,000) for first place, 36,000 for second, 24,000 for third and 3500 for every half-point scored. They hired coaches and seconds, chesss aides-de-camp who sharpen their strategic lances and make sure arrows are stocked in their tactical quivers. They withdrew to secluded locations with their teams and their laptops, running their engines on high-powered clusters in the cloud.

After this arms race, the Candidates is a war of attrition and, as the tournament wore on, the fatigue became obvious and mistakes more common. Rapport was asked how a previous game had gone. I dont know, he said. I dont really care any more. He was half-joking at most.

The prospect of playing elite chess, a game with far more possible positions than there are atoms in the universe, is daunting at best, especially doing so every day for weeks.

For, how should I say, normal people, its not so easy, said Radjabov after a particularly grinding game. Hed briefly delayed the press conference to check a tricky position from the game on his phone.

The American Caruana had already started showing cracks. After a promising first half in which hed won three games out of seven with no losses, hed dropped two games out of the next three.

In round 11, Caruana and Ding opened in the Spanish Game, working their way through its subspecies, the Morphy Defence, the Closed Ruy Lopez and the Anti-Marshall. (Chess players, like taxonomists, love to name things.) Caruana resigned after more than six hours of play.

Meanwhile, the Russian was running away. After Caruanas loss, Nepomniachtchi had opened a yawning 1.5-point lead over the field with three rounds to go. He quickly consolidated this edge the next day, securing a draw in a famous line in the Spanish Game against Nakamura that lasted about only eight minutes, making for a very short day at the office.

Sergey Karjakin was banned from chess for six months for his public support of Russias invasion into Ukraine.

Nepomniachtchi won the Candidates Tournament with a round to spare; he wouldnt lose a single game. For the first time, as Nepomniachtchi emerged from the sanctum and walked down the hall, the auditorium filled with applause. He smiled and clutched his hands to his chest in thanks. I dont feel anything, Nepomniachtchi said. I feel like Im extremely tired. Its an insanely difficult tournament. He was asked if he had anything to say to Carlsen. He made an obscure reference to chess positions and said nothing else on the matter.

Last year, Nepomniachtchi failed spectacularly in the world championship in Dubai, blundering repeatedly to hand the title to Carlsen for continued caretaking. But he exhibited none of those careless tendencies in Madrid. If Nepomniachtchi were to win the world championship, hed join other great Russians Vasily Smyslov, Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov who won first world titles on second attempts.

Chess, like every other sport, has been navigating its way through the war in Ukraine. Wimbledon, which was running concurrent with the Candidates, had banned all Russian players. In March, Nepomniachtchi signed an open letter with some other Russian chess notables: We oppose military actions on the territory of Ukraine and call for an early ceasefire and a peaceful solution to the conflict through dialogue and diplomatic negotiations.

Shortly after the Candidates, Karjakin, the banned Russian, doubled down on his pro-war stance, writing on Telegram to shed light on the vicissitudes of Russian chess. He lambasted the anti-Russian views of those, like Nepomniachtchi, who opposed what Karjakin called the special operation. He dismissed the open letter as Nepomniachtchis ticket to western events... Nepomniachtchis victory shouldnt mislead anyone. Russian professional chess has been in decline lately.

Nakamura suspected that world champ Carlsen and his bluster were full of, um, baloney; lets put it that way. He added, Hes done a bit of trolling, as well. In what certainly seemed like an act of trolling, Carlsen turned up in Madrid towards the end of the Candidates. He took on all comers in speed chess on a sweltering afternoon in El Retiro Park. Then he was gone, headed to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker, where he busted out on the first day.

While in Madrid, Carlsen met Dvorkovich, the Fide president, El Pas reported, and agreed to play, if the world championship format was changed. Carlsen has long called for alterations to the championship match, to include faster games alongside the slower, classical ones. That would move the match-ups closer to the modern game as it is played online and lessen players dependence on The Machine and their memorising of its lessons. In response to a report suggesting he might play, Carlsen tweeted: Fake news.

On July 20, on a podcast for his sponsor, Unibet, Carlsen announced, apparently for real this time, that he was out. I am not motivated to play another match, he said. I simply feel that I dont have a lot to gain, I dont particularly like it, and although Im sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I dont have any inclination to play and I will simply not play the match.

Only two previous world champions did not defend their titles: Alexander Alekhine, because he died, and Bobby Fischer, who disappeared from public life.

I watched the final games from the pressroom in a forgotten high corner of the palace. I noticed that an extra chair, the exact high-back model the Candidates had been sitting in, was stashed there. Before I left, I took a seat.

I imagined what it might be like to be a grand master, to manipulate the positions of little wooden statues just so for money and glory, to fire up this particle accelerator in search of new discoveries, to speak an ancient game like a mother tongue. I leaned back and thought it all remarkably comfortable. I closed my eyes.

Financial Times

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Inside the most important chess tournament in the world - The Australian Financial Review