New Delhi: Cyprus, an island nation in the eastern Mediterranean, will be home to the best of classical chess over the next fortnight as it hosts both the Open and Women’s categories of the 2026 Candidates tournament starting on March 28. Acting as the only pathway to a World Championship match, the tournament has borne the brunt of months of heightened anticipation from the world chess community. Even so, the air surrounding the event is heavy, with the uncertainty of the tournament ahead of its repeat being affected by regional tensions in the Middle East.Trouble has already claimed one high-profile participant. India’s veteran grandmaster Konero Hampi pulled out of the women’s tournament days before the opening ceremony. Concerns have spread elsewhere. World No. 2 Hikaru Nakamura raised the alarm over the region’s lack of stable electricity supply, while the recent cancellation of a World Series of Poker (WSOP) event due to security threats in the region cast a shadow over FIDE’s plans.In response, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) issued a ‘Safety and Logistics FAQ’ five days before the start, dismissing the risks as “very low and exaggerated”. But for the players the board is never isolated from the world. What’s it like to calculate grand strategies when you know global tensions are brewing just outside the walls?In September 1978, a young Praveen Thipse, decades away from becoming India’s third grandmaster, arrived in Tehran with former national champion Mohammad Rafiq Khan. They were there to play, but the Iran they entered was a country dying of a monarchy.The pro-Western monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was collapsing under the weight of mass civil resistance. On September 8, 1978, known as “Black Friday,” the military opened fire on protesters in Tehran, killing hundreds and marking a point of no return for the regime.“Well, when I was young, and I was in Iran during the Shah’s regime, and it was after September 8, 1978, when the students demonstrated,” Theapse told TimesofIndia.com. “So when we actually entered the city, we saw tanks on the road, there were other problems, but what was important was that we saw tanks on the road, and it was disturbing for a day or two.”In the 1970s, the chess world was a smaller, more insular community. Players traveled to distant lands with little more than a pocket set and a few letters of introduction. There were no smartphones, no social media feeds to provide minute-by-minute updates on troop movements.“We found it a little strange, but there was no access to the news, and we were visiting Iran for the first time,” Thapse recalled. “We didn’t know much. I was also very young. There were Russians and Americans playing, other Filipinos, other players. So I guess we lived in our own world.”The tournament was held at the Olympic Village in Tehran. “It was far from the city, and where entry was restricted, and we rarely ventured out,” he explained. This physical separation was compounded by a total linguistic and digital blackout. “We didn’t get any news from the outside world because in those days, in 1978, nobody spoke English in Iran and all the newspapers were in Iranian.” So we couldn’t really get any information. There is no television,” he told this website.Today, athletes are highly connected. They monitor geopolitical changes as closely as they do early novelties. But that was not the case in 1978.“Even when I went to World Junior, I had no way of contacting my parents on the phone. I just wrote a few letters. I never got a reply because it took so long,” Theapse notes.In the weeks following the tournament, the Iranian Revolution would accelerate, eventually leading to the exile of the Shah in January 1979 and the rise of the Islamic Republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. “There was no direct violence in front of us, and the tanks were only there to prevent the crowd from gathering,” the 66-year-old said. “I think I saw it, it didn’t affect me at the time. I don’t know if it doesn’t affect me today or if it affects other players, but that’s my only experience, we only played one tournament.”While the Revolution did not enter the Olympic Village, the elements did. “We didn’t do very well because it was so cold,” Theapse admitted. “I think that’s the main reason. It was surprisingly quite cold at night.”However, the Iranian players must have felt the weight of the coming storm. Under the new regime that followed, chess would eventually be banned for several years, deemed “un-Islamic”, before being reinstated in the late 1980s. But in the fall of 1978, the silence between locals and foreigners painted a clear picture of a global dilemma, as Thipse concluded, “We, me and Rafiq Khan, or the Russians, the Americans, the Filipinos were not affected by it. And the Iranians, if they were, we don’t know, but they never talked to us about these things.”
