The New Yorker:

The fuss around the grand master’s wearing of denim pants to a tournament is a reflection of tensions within the game.

By Louisa Thomas

On a recent Friday afternoon, Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player in the world, showed up at the World Rapid Championships, on Wall Street, in New York, wearing a blazer, dress shoes, and jeans. fide, chess’s main governing body, stipulates a certain level of decorum; an arbiter informed Carlsen that, in order to be eligible to play in the tournament, he’d have to return to his hotel and change his pants. He refused. He’d accept the two-hundred-dollar fine, he explained. He offered to not wear jeans the next day, but he wasn’t going back to change. Rules were rules. When fide wouldn’t budge, Carlsen withdrew from the tournament. It was “a matter of principle,” he said afterward, in an interview on the chess platform Take Take Take. “I’m too old at this point to care too much,” he added. “My patience with [fide] was not very big to begin with. . . . They can enforce their rules. That’s fine by me. My response is, Fine, then I’m out, fuck you.”

Carlsen’s attire made the news, as these sorts of things sometimes do. The Wall Street Journal called it a “farce.” Many players seemed to agree. “I don’t think there’s a single player . . . who’s not going to watch the event because Magnus is playing in jeans or his underwear or, I don’t know, a Speedo,” Hikaru Nakamura, a popular chess streamer and the No. 3 player in the world, said on a live stream that evening. “They want to see Magnus Carlsen play chess.” And it was clear that Carlsen hadn’t shown up at the tournament that day as if spoiling for a fight. He looked like any other young businessman in the financial district rushing from a work lunch. But it wasn’t farce, however absurdly or innocently it began. It was part of a bigger “situation,” as Nakamura put it to Take Take Take, one that was bound to have “happened one way or another.” Perhaps it was fitting that it involved jeans. After all, jeans aren’t just pants. They’ve been a fuck-you symbol ever since Marlon Brando wore a pair in “The Wild One.”

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