TWIC is 30. First issue 17th September 1994.
13th Norway Chess 2025 (10)
Carlsen wins Norway Chess for the seventh time
Mark Crowther - Saturday 7th June 2025
Arjun Erigaisi and Magnus Carlsen during Round 10. Photo © Norway Chess. | https://norwaychess.no
Magnus Carlsen won the Norway Chess tournament for the seventh time in thirteen outings. Carlsen set up the result with a round 9 grind against Fabiano Caruana. Carlsen was a pawn up but whilst the engine said that initially Caruana should hold, in practice it was beyond him. In the final round Carlsen was put under pressure by Arjun Erigaisi, bailed out with a Queen sacrifice, looked in trouble, turned it around to be winning before finally settling for a draw in time trouble. That result guaranteed Carlsen at least a tie-break for first place and after Gukesh lost it won him the tournament. When all the other games had finished Erigaisi beat him in their Armageddon tie-break.
Going into the final round Gukesh was just behind Carlsen and had black against Fabiano Caruana. Gukesh was gradually outplayed and dead lost for a long time, then towards the end he pulled back to equality, only to blunder for a final time, costing him a chance at first.
Gukesh scored 4.5/5 with white but only 0.5/5 with black, a strange disparity. He also had far too many bad postions, although his ability to play them is impressive. I don't doubt there's still a lot of improvement to come.
Second place went to Fabiano Caruana after his win over Gukesh. Caruana's play is still a bit patchy but he's a derserved world number 4 and definitely is entitled to think he can win a candidates and a world champonship.
Both Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura are talking about stopping playing classical chess. Yet Carlsen cared very much about his result here. Given Carlsen's recent results in other forms of the game and at times the enormous gap between him and the other players, I wasn't in much doubt Carlsen was favourite here.
Carlsen and Nakamura have spoken about retirement from classical chess. I'm not sure it means very much, whilst they're both playing huge amounts of competitive chess at faster time controls, the ability to play classical chess at any time will remain. I think Nakamura in particular has proved that. Carlsen was involved in a lot of scrappy games and seemed by the end to be enjoying the challenge, there is a new generation of players not yet cowed by losing too many games to him.
The other talking point, one that overshadowed the entire tournament, was Carlsen banging the table against Gukesh just before he resigned. I do think it was overblown, these things happen, the turnaround from a win to a loss can be the most upsetting part of the game, and he recovered his composure pretty quickly. His explanation was that his target for the event was really prove he was still a lot better than the World Champion Gukesh and this was spoiled by the loss. The video has seen huge numbers (millions) of views; even my accountant asked me about it; is all publicity good publicity?
Although nominally a classical event Norway Chess had a brutally short 10 second increment after move 40, making the finishes to many of the games distinctly rapid, and that's where we saw most of the turnarounds and mistakes. Your mileage may vary as to whether you think this is exciting or not.
In the women's section Anna Muzychuk won this extremely tightly contested event, her win against Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun in Round 9 set up the victory, and she only needed a draw in the end against Vaishali in the final round to secure first. Lei Tingjie took second place with a fabulously determined grind against Sarasadat Khademalsharieh where she generated winning chances out of very little indeed, ending up a winner in 103 moves.
Aravindh Chithambaram edged out Praggnanandhaa to take first place on tie-break in the Stepan Avagyan Memorial. The both won in the final roundm,having tremendous years so far, and are fighting it out for a Candidates place via the FIDE circuit 2025, Praggnanandhaa is definitely in front at the moment.
I've added some of the key games to an annotated file. There's really been too much for me to annotate these games properly, so they're mostly just done with a combination of Stockfish and ChessBase.
13th Norway Chess Tournament 2025 Final Round Commentary
View the games on this Page
Download the PGN from this page
vs
