World No 1 Magnus Carlsen won the Norway Chess $150,000 elite tournament in Stavanger on Friday after Gukesh Dommaraju, the Indian world champion, missed his chance to draw with world No 2 Fabiano Caruana and instead fell into a knight fork of his queen and rook.
Final scores were Carlsen (Norway) 16; Caruana (US) 15.5; Gukesh (India) 14.5; Hikaru Nakamura (US) 14; Arjun Erigaisi (India) 13; Wei Yi (China) 9.5. In his final Armageddon game, Carlsen blundered into mate in two against Erigaisi in mid-board in a drawn position, though that did not affect the standings.
Stavanger uses a special scoring system, where a win counts three points and a loss zero, while draws are replayed, with a draw on the board scoring a win for Black.
Carlsen told Take Take Take, the Chess app he co-founded: “It’s a long time since I enjoyed a classical tournament.” Later, with talk that Stavanger might be his last classical event, he expanded on that comment and on his defeat from a winning position by Gukesh: “The dream of playing a really good tournament burst with that game. I wanted a score that reflects the fact that I’m still significantly better at chess, and since I couldn’t achieve that, a potential win of the tournament would not mean as much.”
Carlsen will next play in Wynn Las Vegas in July, part of the $750,000 five-series Freestyle Grand Slam that has so far taken in Germany and Paris and ends in Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. The US leg of the Grand Slam was originally scheduled for New York, but was moved to Wynn Las Vegas for better publicity, including a chess event with baseball stars.
Nakamura, world No 2 and a popular chess streamer with two million followers, has, like Carlsen, played little in recent years apart from the world title series. Both are in their mid-thirties and no longer need the money from chess tournaments, so the time may be approaching when they will retire and the new generation of Indian talents led by Gukesh take over. Four of the top 10 in the live ratings are currently Indians, three of them aged under 22.
In contrast to the outgoing and extrovert Carlsen and Nakamura, this quartet are all modest personalities, whose strength is in their dedicated ambition and work rate, making it very difficult for opponents to find holes in their repertoires. Looking further ahead, two of the potential future stars are Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş, 14, of Turkey, and Russia’s Roman Shogdzhiev, 10.
England, meanwhile, has no significant contenders.
Puzzle 2627
Martin Mitchell v Keith Arkell, Blackpool 2025. White (to move) chose the centralising 1 Qd4. Could he have done better?
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