World #22 Maxime Vachier-Lagrave has long been a fixture of the chess elite, but he has now etched his name into the record books with the exact same number: 22 consecutive draws in classical chess across three tournaments and three and a half months of play.

While patzers like myself will inevitably blunder something in a drawn rook and pawn endgame, chess grandmasters are cut from a different cloth, and they can steer most of the even positions to a drawn conclusion. This is especially true in classical chess, the pinnacle of the royal game, where the oceans of time available to think allow them to play with incredible precision.