The Week in Chess

Magnus Carlsen won his own Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Final on the final day by drawing a final Armageddon game with black against Hikaru Nakamura. This was a fitting end to an extremely closely contested match and on a day where earlier Nakamura was one draw away from the title himself.

"It's extremely harsh on him, he played a great match and made it extremely difficult for me. It' rough, obviously." - Carlsen.

Carlsen said that he struggled to find a good rhythm to his play throughout the event, something that is usually required for good speed chess. Nakamura kept posing difficulties for Carlsen right to the very end and he would have been a very deserving winner. For it all to some down to a tie-break of two blitz games (both decisive) and finally an Armageddon meant that really no player proved their superiority but the rather brutal rules of the competition had their say. Nakamura's play impressed throughout and it's hard to imagine another player doing as well as he did against the World Champion.

Earlier Carlsen won a nice first rapid game but Nakamura struck back in the third, this game was the one that upset Carlsen the most he said afterwards. Then in the blitz Nakamura won the first game and Carlsen at that point didn't rate his chances very highly but he did come through to win the second game. Carlsen's success throughout the tour meant that he got to choose the colours in any Armageddon tie-breaks, in the Round 5 one he lost he made a rather impetuous decision to play with white and go for the win, this time he decided long before the final he was going to choose black. He also lost 19 seconds at the start of the Armageddon game by deciding to change from a large projection of the game to one on his laptop screen, obviously a rather strange thing to do as he was obviously aware as he told the story.

The event also managed to raise $50,000 for the charity Kiva. What now though? Carlsen will play the over the board event the 8th Altibox Norway Chess tournament 5th to 16th October with Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, Anish Giri, Alireza Firouzja and Aryan Tari, perhaps the only over the board superGM event of the year since the lock down apart from the Candidates tournament. Also the FIDE Online Olympiad which has been going on some time on Chess.com is reaching the phase where the top nations and players are now competing. But will there be other online events? I'm going to start playing the 4NCL Online soon, I'm not expecting normal chess to resume for some time. The same will surely be true for most players, it's time to recognise there will only be limited outlets for serious over the board chess for some time.