Dear reader, welcome to a new edition of Damkunst!
In four episodes, I will take you through my journey to the World Championship title, which took place from December 19 to 30 at the town hall in Wageningen. I will share how my preparation went, how much of that preparation actually made it to the board, how I experienced the match, and much more!
Let’s start at the beginning. My previous article for Damkunst was published shortly after I claimed victory at the Riga Open 2023. Following the World Cup in Paris, this was my second tournament win in a series of four: after Riga, I went on to win the World Cup in Rotterdam and the Nijmegen Open. Thanks in part to this remarkably successful summer, I became the overall winner of the 2023 World Cup standings and topped the international rating list. With the World Championship in Curaçao approaching in October, would 2023 truly become my year...? That turned out quite differently!
Much has already been written about that World Championship, but besides my incredibly strong Dutch colleagues, there were others eyeing the title as well. In particular, the Ukrainian Yuri Anikeev. I still vividly remember how close it was—Anikeev almost defeated my teammate and friend Jitse Slump in the World Cup tournament in Riga. Slump barely managed to secure a draw, but that game was especially revealing of the aggressive, attacking style the Ukrainian has developed over the past few years—one that has made him incredibly effective. A bystander remarked aloud: "Yuri is going to make this World Championship very exciting!" And so he did...
Where everything went wrong for me at the World Championship, everything went right for Anikeev. In the first half of the tournament, he strung together one victory after another, building a comfortable lead over the chasing pack. Around the halfway mark, I started to find my rhythm and managed to win a remarkable game against French Grandmaster Arnaud Cordier, who had denied me the world title back in 2015. At that moment, I was back on track for the world title... but Anikeev responded two rounds before the end with a brilliant tactical victory over the rock-solid Dutch Grandmaster Martin Dolfing. By then, it was clear: Anikeev's very first medal at a World Championship was immediately a gold one.
I finished in second place, but since Roel Boomstra had relinquished his rights as world champion after his match victory over Alexander Shvartsman in 2022, it quickly became clear that I would get to play the world title match against Anikeev in 2024. That was quite a consolation at the time—despite not succeeding in 2023, I would still have a chance in 2024 to claim the title in a direct duel.
In addition to being a "professional" draughts player, I am also a master's student in Particle and Astrophysics at Radboud University. The (second) half of this master's program consists of an independent research project. There was a similar research project during my bachelor's as well, but that lasted only six months and was worth 12 ECTS. In the master's program, it's worth 60 ECTS, which essentially means you have to work on it full-time for an entire year. My experience from my bachelor's was that such a research project never really comes at a convenient time when you're also trying to maintain a draughts career—I completed my bachelor's thesis during the 2021 Dutch Championship in Kraggenburg. The scope of a master's research project makes this challenge even more pronounced. Even though I knew I would be playing a world title match in the second half of 2024, I decided at the beginning of the year to schedule a meeting with a professor from the High Energy Physics department to discuss a research project on dark matter. Although I had to catch up on some material in the following months, I was able to start my research in May 2024.
When it finally became clear (after quite a bit of hassle, by the way) that the match would be played in December, I immediately made solid arrangements with both my university supervisors and my preparation team. I agreed with my supervisors that I would be able to pause my research for about two months around the match to focus on my preparation. I estimated that I would need about four weeks from that point until the start of the match. During those four weeks, we planned to set up an intensive program with sparring, concrete opening preparation, and everything else that comes with a match of this magnitude.
In the summer, I had already had a good discussion with my team (which at the time consisted of Rik Keurentjes and Alexander Baliakin), where we primarily asked ourselves some key questions. How are we going to win the match? And more importantly, how is Anikeev going to win the match? How can we prevent that? Who else can we add to our preparation team to help us with the preparation and with answering these questions? And finally: you don’t seriously think that four weeks of preparation will be enough to win the match, do you—when your opponent may have been preparing for an entire year? What are you going to do in the coming months to prepare, in between your research?
The first thing I tried to do was to get a clear profile of Anikeev as a draughts player. Before I embarked on this whole adventure, he struck me as incredibly solid and nearly impenetrable—a style that makes him almost unbeatable but also prevents him from being truly productive. A highly technical player, for whom "a beautiful position is a good position." But when I took a closer look at his games from the past few years, I noticed that he had indeed made some adjustments. What immediately stood out was that he had expanded his opening repertoire against players he wanted to beat—using, for instance, the hyper-aggressive 1. 35-30! with White and the classic Vos variant with Black. It was as if, with his fundamentally sound style, he was deliberately forcing himself to create chaos on the board from the very first move in order to be more effective.
The second thing that stood out to me was that my initial classification of his play was far too simplistic. He is, in his own way, a principled player, but an important detail is that it always has to be on his terms. My own terms are often quite vague; I would accept a slightly inferior but sharp position against many players under the reasoning of "at least it's a sharp position." I think this mainly has to do with the fact that in a sharp, locked position, a mistake can have a much greater impact than in an open position. But Anikeev, I believe, has a very clear idea of which types of positions and openings he does and doesn’t want against certain players—and he sticks to it. He has no trouble exchanging into a draw or simplifying the position if it no longer suits him. That is precisely what makes him so difficult to beat: he never overextends, unlike me, who sometimes pushes too far.
What also stands out is that he manages his clock in an extremely methodical way: he relies on his intuition and always keeps enough time for the later phase of the game. Sometimes to calculate a win, sometimes to secure a draw in the clearest possible way.
With all this in mind, my team and I tried to anticipate Anikeev’s strategy for this match. We established two things:
- Since time management is one of my own weaknesses, Anikeev will try to exploit it as much as possible. He will likely try to hold back, maybe even give me a slight initiative, to force me to spend time squeezing the position for everything it has. He will want to avoid a pure calculation battle—because that is not his strength, whereas it is mine.
- A somewhat stronger statement: if I don’t run into time trouble, I don’t see how I could lose a game against him.
That was perhaps mainly important to remind myself that I didn’t need to do anything extraordinary to win this match, especially if he adopted a slightly provocative playing style.
In the meantime, we had also decided to add my friend and colleague Jitse Slump to our team. Baliakin, Slump and I had several productive sessions where we tried to analyse and understand Anikeev’s play. Additionally, since around March, I had found an excellent and reliable sparring partner in the Chinese vice world champion, Yiming Pan. Because I played far fewer tournaments than usual in 2024 due to my research, we arranged almost weekly blitz sessions between March and October to "stay in touch with the game".
Fast forward to November 25, the moment I temporarily paused my studies. An intense period began, during which we finalized the entire preparation in just three weeks. In addition to the three previously mentioned names (Keurentjes, Baliakin, and Slump), I also received support from Wouter Sipma. Sipma participated in the sparring sessions and shared his valuable experiences from the three matches he had witnessed as Roel Boomstra’s second. Slump was there for the entire three-week preparation and even joined our team meetings every evening during the match.
During those three weeks, we prioritized my opening choices. I thought it would be a good idea to look for deeper ideas in openings that he hadn't extensively prepared but simply relied on. Within that framework, we put almost all of his 'standard openings' under a magnifying glass—finding something interesting in some, but in many, not at all. Of course, there's always a chance that he would try to do the same to me and undermine my opening choices, but by deviating from my own well-trodden paths, I eliminate that risk right away.
After three weeks, our preparation was complete—databases full of games, ideas, and written summaries of all our discussions and training sessions. It was almost time to begin! To be honest, the tension in that final week was overwhelming, and it only increased as December 19 drew closer. Fortunately, I had talked about it extensively with my sports psychologist in the lead-up to the match and had a strategy for dealing with the pressure. But I’m not exaggerating when I say these were about to become the most important two weeks of my life so far. I was well-prepared, and now I just had to stay calm and stick to what my team and I had planned.
On the evening before the first game, a thousand thoughts raced through my mind. Should I go for 1. 35-30!? after all, as a form of psychological warfare? To immediately make him feel that I know his own weapons better than he does? Or should I opt for 1. 33-29, knowing that in recent years he has only responded with 1...17-22? I already find the Keller opening difficult with White, and my biggest issue is that Black gets about 25 free moves (if not more), and after enduring the entire examination, he still ends up with at least an equal position—if not better. What am I getting myself into? Within the Keller, we hadn’t found any significant deviations either. No, it had to be 1. 34-29 or 1. 32-28, my two most trusted opening moves. To get a clear picture of his strategy and whether he had built a new opening repertoire specifically for this match, I ultimately chose the latter. We had at least one strong option prepared for every possible response, and often more than one. I had never arrived at a game so well-prepared...
Overview of the 2024 World Championship Match Anikeev-Groenendijk
Below is the analysis of the first game of the match. Match games two through five are also available and can be accessed by clicking on the blue links. Games seven to twelve, as well as the subsequent tiebreak games, will be published here later.
Second game
Third game
Fourth game
Fifth game