It was a smile from a member of the audience which hoodwinked Hikaru Nakamura into making an embarrassing blunder.The year was 2016, and in the second round of the Candidates, Nakamura, the great American hope, was facing off against the Russian Sergey Karjakin. In the middlegame, Nakamura, trying to give his eyes a rest from staring at the board, cast his glance into the audience, where his eyes fell on the then FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and an aide. Both held smiles on their faces. It got Nakamura thinking.“This sounds fairly embarrassing to say, but when I saw that they were smiling, for whatever reason, it made me miscalculate. I had seen a tactical idea on the board and when I saw them smiling, somehow I put two and two together. I thought that because they were smiling, there was some sort of trick in the position. It sounds really ridiculous as a professional chess player to let something like that get into your mind. I blundered, made a very basic miscalculation in a game based on a smile from the audience,” Nakamura admitted in a video for his YouTube channel many years later.Such is the heightened pressure of the Candidates tournament that something as innocuous as an audience member’s smile can make players imagine things.Levon Aronian, one of the most affable grandmasters on the circuit, recounts how it was at a Candidates that he was accused of “throwing a game”. Aronian doesn’t name the player involved, but recounts that he was already out of the running for the title and was playing one of the two front-runners, when he got a message from the other players’ camp. ‘I hope you play fair tomorrow,’ the message read. Levon Aronian was once accused of “throwing a game” at the Candidates. (PHOTO: Crystal Fuller/Saint Louis Chess)“It was totally absurd. That has never happened to me: nobody has ever accused me of thinking about throwing a game! So the Candidates is an event that messes people’s brains and they can actually project things on others that maybe they would do,” Aronian told FIDE in an interview recently before noting that the message had been counter-productive. “Before the game, I had been preparing a very extremely solid opening. But after that message I was (so upset) that I didn’t care anymore. I said I’ll just play anything. I lost that game and it actually changed the fate of the tournament.”ALSO READ | The men, the machines (and the psychic mediums) that helped top grandmasters prepare for elite tournamentsStory continues below this adEach of the top classical events on the chess calendar have their unique flavours, and can make a case to be called the toughest test in chess. The World Championship pits two players against each other again and again for 14 battles of wits. The World Cup has elimination-based one-on-one mini-battles that chess players are not used to.But it’s the Candidates where usually all hell breaks loose. It’s an eight-player battle royale where only finishing first matters. As former world champion Vladimir Kramnik once proclaimed, “There’s really no difference between a second and an eighth-place finish at this tournament”.This makes players take desperate measures and go for broke over and over again in the 14-round event.ALSO READ| Fabiano Caruana and the burden of being second bestStory continues below this adIt’s why Carlsen once called it “psychologically almost as tough as the world championship”. It’s why Javokhir Sindarov, who calls himself a “solid player” otherwise, has already proclaimed that he will bring “unpredictability” in his openings at the upcoming Candidates. It’s why Karjakin, after winning the Candidates in 2016, had said that he had to “get accustomed to the unceasing company of a great deal of stress”. Hikaru Nakamura failed to stop Gukesh from winning Candidates in 2024. (PHOTO: FIDE/Michal Walusza)The ‘unceasing company of a great deal of stress’ forces players so close to the edge that even the tiniest things can tick them off. That’s why at the last Candidates in Toronto, one of the players had complained to the arbiters that Alireza Firouzja was “walking too loudly” during games.Such is the pressure of the Candidates that Chinese grandmaster Wang Hao retired after the 2021 Candidates—at the age of 31(!) — grumbling about the pressure of playing the game, a feeling no doubt exacerbated by playing at the event.As Ian Nepomniachtchi said after winning the 2021 edition: “People just go completely crazy for some reason (at the Candidates)! The stakes are so high that they can’t help it. The smaller problem is that players can’t play their best chess because they are affected by the strength of their opponents, the preparation, and the pressure itself. But the bigger problem is that sometimes you’re just going completely crazy, you play some moves or make some decisions you’d never make in any other circumstances.”Story continues below this adALSO READ | FIDE’s Candidates gambit in Cyprus comes with a deja vu from the COVID eraNepo pointed at the London 2013 Candidates as a prime example of people going “completely crazy” in the Candidates. At that event, entering the final round, Kramnik and Carlsen had been tied on points. Nepo said that Kramnik, with black pieces against a player of Vasyl Ivanchuk’s calibre, had opted for the Pirc Defence because he was desperate to win, assuming that Carlsen would never lose with white pieces against Peter Svidler. At the end, that risky opening ploy blew up in Kramnik’s face as not only did he lose to Iranchuk, Carlsen too lost with white. Had Kramnik played safe and gone for a draw, he would have qualified to face Vishy Anand in the 2013 World Championship. Instead, that decision became the start of Carlsen’s reign.