Tension, pressure, nerve, genius: At the chess c'ship, the wait is worth it

For all the flow of action, all sport involves varied acts of waiting. We wait for the goal in football, the shooter to fire between heartbeats, a snarling Rafael Nadal to uppercut the air in delight.

- Rohit Brijnath

We appreciate greatness takes time, we understand anticipation has a tense thrill, yet chess has its own particular romance with waiting.

In a corner of Sentosa, India's Gukesh Dommaraju makes his first seven moves in under 50 seconds. It is the inaugural game of the 2024 World Chess Championship on Nov 25. Then Ding Liren waits, and so do we for over 27 minutes – the time Eliud Kipchoge once took to run almost 10km – just for him to make his seventh move.

Is he nervous, remembering a variation, plotting, contemplating, all of this? His jacket is off, he cups his cheek. Golf, said the legendary player Bobby Jones, is a "game played on a five-inch course – the distance between your ears".

No, this is.

It is cold calculation in the heat of a first game. It is entertaining in its building tension. It is a clock that quietly exerts pressure. This writer is an outsider, unschooled in the nuances of chess, yet the day is fascinating. "Wild," says an Indian journalist. Every sport is encased in a unique beauty, in its dress, its codes, its specific interrogations. Chess feels like a well-dressed version of cage fighting. Think of it as violence of thought. "The object," said Bobby Fischer, "is to crush the opponent's mind."