Nine months after the Winter Olympic Games, a different but equally fierce competition is going down in Sochi, Russia: the World Chess Championship.
On Saturday the current champion, 23-year-old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, will begin to defend his title against Viswanathan “Vishy” Anand, a 44-year-old, four-time world champion whom Carlsen beat last year, the Wall Street Journal reports. (The championship’s opening ceremony took place Friday.)
Their face-off will be the first back-to-back rematch for the top title since 1990, when Garry Kasparov beat Anatoly Karpov in a best-of-24 showdown.
Carlsen is the first Western-born world chess champion since Bobby Fischer took the title in 1972 after beating Boris Spassky of Russia.
[WSJ]
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Write to Nolan Feeney at nolan.feeney@time.com