World Chess Championship heats up with battle on the board, and Vladimir Kramnik rumours off it

As the World Chess Championship heats up, with Game 7 becoming the fourth game in a row to yield a result, Vladimir Kramnik, the last man from Russia to become the World Chess Champion, emerged from the shadows. Allegedly!
In the world of chess, rumour has it that Kramnik is part of Ian Nepomniachtchi’s team as the Russian attempts to wrest away the most coveted crown in the sport from China’s Ding Liren. Of course, the omerta that surrounds contenders’ teams at the World Championship means we are unlikely to find out immediately if this is true.
But the rumour is strong — and intriguing — enough for it to find mention in FIDE’s official commentary, British chess master Leonard Barden’s column, the C-Squared Podcast (which is co-hosted Fabiano Caruana), GM Gata Kamsky’s podcast and the Chess.com’s live analysis (helmed GM Anish Giri).
Grandmaster Pravin Thipsay has been analysing games of the World Chess Championship for The Indian Express. You can read his insightful analysis in his columns for Game 1, Game 2, Game 3, Game 4, Game 5, Game 6 and Game 7
As eight-time US Women’s Champion Irina Krush speculated on FIDE’s live broadcast how Kramnik would even find the time to work with Nepo, considering he was in Berlin playing a tournament recently and had arrived in Astana to participate in another event, GM Daniil Dubov said: “This rapid tournament could just be a draction, you know? From his main job (helping Nepo). It’s a reasonable guess. It’s quite likely that they met, had a few training sessions together, and discussed a few openings. It’s a very tricky topic.”
On Sunday, Kramnik played a simultaneous exhibition match against kids in Astana and launched a chess app.The value of having a formidable ally such as Kramnik in your corner as a sherpa cannot be understated. Not only is he the 14th world champion, he also has the experience of helping Garry Kasparov against Viswanathan Anand in 1995 and Anand against Veselin Topalov in 2010.
Ding, on the other hand, has broken from convention and openly announced that Hungarian GM Richard Rapport, who was a contender in the Candidates Tournament, is helping him as a second.
Cloak-and-dagger
In the hory of World Chess Championship contests, the secrecy surrounding which player is helping a contender prepare has assumed folkloric proportions.
Anand has candidly admitted to feeling a “pinch” when he found out that Kramnik was helping Kasparov against him in 1995 at New York.
While doing commentary for one of the Nepo-Ding games recently, Anand spoke of how he had found out that Kramnik was helping his rival. As the tale goes, when he landed in New York for the contest, he very innocently asked a woman helping the organisers with logics who else had arrived for the contest. The woman, not aware of the cloak-and-dagger game that she was unwittingly becoming a part of, rattled off the names of people who had arrived. “Oh, and there was someone called Kram… can’t recollect his name,” she said. When Anand asked if it was Kramnik, his worst suspicions were confirmed. But he needed to have 100 percent surety, so he further prodded what hotel Kramnik had been driven to. When the woman told him the name, it was confirmed: Kramnik had gone to Kasparov’s hotel and would be in his compatriot’s corner.
“It’s always funny to me when there are these speculations. Cause you can have Kramnik on your team, you can have Garry Kasparov on your team, you can have the ghost of Bob Fischer on your team… you still have to regardless sit down on the board and play. I don’t think it changes a huge deal if you have one specific person. Of course, Kramnik is a legend. But I don’t think he’s going to give you a secret sauce that will make anyone world champion,” said Caruana on his podcast.