Why Alireza Firouzja is playing elite chess event lying on his hotel room bed | Chess News

Despite being in crippling pain, Alireza managed to hold the Uzbekistan grandmaster to a draw on a day when all five contests ended in stalemates.

“After the third round, Alireza suffered an ankle injury. Fortunately, the ankle was not broken or fractured. After consulting with his team and the tournament organisers, he has decided to continue the tournament in a special room with the agreement of his opponents and the presence of an arbiter,” veteran grandmaster Yasser Seirawan announced on the live broadcast before the start of round 5 of the tournament. “We are thrilled that Alireza remains in the tournament and is willing to continue to play.”

The ankle injury meant that Alireza had to skip his fourth round game against American grandmaster Fabiano Caruana. But the organisers, considerate of the physical injury that prevented the youngster from playing, have also allowed Alireza to face Caruana in a game on Tuesday, when the rest of the players will have a rest day.

Alireza’s draw with Sindarov meant that he ended the fifth round with a single point to his name and marooned at last spot in the 10-player standings, but with one game left to play. Sindarov, who was in red-hot form at the Candidates tournament, sweeping to the title with an unbeaten run in 14 games, has had a wretched run at Romania, going winless in five rounds.

India’s Praggnanandhaa continued his own streak of staying unbeaten in the tournament so far after holding off veteran American GM Wesley So to a draw.

In the middle of the fifth round while talking about Alireza’s situation on the live commentary, Seirawan, one of the sport’s greatest storytellers, dipped into his hat and spoke about other such unusual contests. Seirawan pointed at British grandmaster Tony Miles who had famously played chess while lying face downwards on a massage table during the 1985 Interpolis tournament in Tilburg.

The story goes that Miles’ spine had locked up in the middle of the Interpolis tournament, which used to be one of the strongest invitational competitions on the circuit a few decades ago. And while he was on the verge of withdrawing from the event — since he could not sit on a chair without experiencing shooting pains in his back — the organisers offered him a unique solution: he could play from a massage table.

Initially, the rest of the field agreed. Then, as the wins started coming, the murmurs began. Reportedly, many of the players submitted a written complaint to the organisers that the sight of Miles sprawled in front of them was a source of distraction. The organisers were having none of it though and rejected the complaint.

Distraction or not, what was remarkable was that the new perspective that lying prone during games provided Miles with actually helped him win the tournament over a field that included players of the calibre of Viktor Korchnoi.

That’s the kind of lying luck that Alireza will be hoping to summon with his new situation. He was winless in the tournament in the first three rounds, losing to fellow French grandmaster Maxime Vachier-Legrave and Anish Giri. He played out a first round draw with India’s R Praggnanandhaa.