Two weeks after Vincent Keymer After achieving his “by far greatest success in classical chess” at the Grand Chess Tour in Bucharest, he was ultimately only passively involved in the fight for tournament victory at “Norway Chess”. Although he planned the matches as ambitiously as in Bucharest, almost all of them ended in a draw and he only managed one win against the world champion Dommaraju Gukesh. The 21-year-old German top player suffered his only defeat in the last round against Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, who was a few months younger.
With a fourth win in a row, the Indian has moved up from last to first place and is back in the top ten of the world rankings after his fall from grace over the last few months. In Bucharest He was fifth and Keymer first, but in Oslo they swapped positions.
“He had overplayed himself”
From his own experience, Keymer knows only too well what is going on at “Pragg”. “He is well prepared, he works hard and is a very good player, but he overplayed himself,” he said in an interview with the FAZ. A few months ago it happened to him himself. At the beginning of March in Prague he felt that the focus was missing. Then he took a break.
In April he only played two Bundesliga games and the freestyle tournament with drawn basic positions in Karlsruhe, which he won. Because his girlfriend is studying in Vienna, he now lives in the Austrian capital. One of his favorite discoveries is a Japanese garden: “I found it very beautiful. It’s more the simplicity of the things.”
Keymer seems like someone who has found his place. This also applies stylistically. With his tailcoat vest and a shiny gold ring on the index finger of his right hand, with which he draws the figures, the grandmaster, who stands over 1.90 meters tall, stands out among his colleagues. In terms of sport, “I have now established myself in the top ten in classical chess,” he says.
Carlsen left out
Because Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura hardly compete in classical tournaments anymore, they are left out. Of the others, Fabiano Caruana, currently number two in the world rankings, is playing the most stable. Among the next best, sometimes this one is in front, sometimes that one is in front, “and I expect that it will continue like this for a while. So I would say that there is no clear hierarchy at the moment.”
World Championship challenger Dzhavokhir Zindarov “is definitely very good. But I don’t think he is clearly better than Abdusattorov, Arjun, Pragg, Gukesh or me. I would put him in the same row as us for the moment.” According to Keymer, the Uzbek was extremely lucky in the opening game of the Candidates Tournament against Andrej Jessipenko, which was bad for him: “He could have easily lost that, and if he had lost that, he would probably have ended up in the last three or four places. He managed to win this game and kept the flow with him.”
Gukesh struggles
Gukesh is currently experiencing the opposite. A year and a half ago, Keymer assisted him in preparing for the World Cup final against Ding Liren. Since then, the Indian has hardly had any good results. He came last in Oslo and is now only 26th in the world rankings. “I think for him it’s no longer the full calendar, but rather the burden of the title, so to speak. But I don’t know enough details because it goes very deep into his personality.”
He himself worked with a mental trainer for a short time and first realized how important it was to “recharge your mental energy”. Keymer sees the fact that players like him are currently in greater demand than ever before as a “very privileged situation”.
“I’m just not able to play everything that would be interesting this year. If two events overlap, that’s not a problem for me. When you’re always on the go and playing tournament, tournament, tournament, you don’t get a chance to let what’s happened sink in and process it. In terms of chess, of course you have to prepare when world-class events are coming up, but I’ve also made sure that I’m coming back to myself a bit and that I’m mentally ready for the tournaments.”
