Norway’s world No 1 Magnus Carlsen yesterday achieved another major success after a couple of anxious days when it seemed his powers might be waning.
India’s world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, 19, had created a bang, literally, last month at Stavanger when he defeated Magnus Carlsen on the 35-year-old’s home turf. Images of the Norwegian’s angry table thump in response went round the world.
Last week Gukesh repeated his achievement, this time at the $175,000 Superunited Rapid and Blitz tournament in Zagreb, Croatia, part of the Grand Chess Tour sponsored by the St Louis billionaire and FT reader Rex Sinquefield.
It was an embarrassing moment for Carlsen, 35, who had said that he would treat Gukesh as “one of my weaker opponents”. The game followed the same formula as Stavanger: an early advantage for Carlsen, some inexact play, then a successful comeback by the Indian teenager. “Now we can question Carlsen’s domination,” said the former champion Garry Kasparov.
After the one-hour rapid section in Zagreb and before the five-minute blitz, Gukesh had a winning streak of five games in succession and was three points ahead of Carlsen. However, true champions are stimulated to their best performances by adversity.
When the format changed to blitz, Carlsen suddenly hit his own winning streak, with an unbeaten eight-game run. That included his third game against Gukesh, where he was potentially on a hat-trick of defeats following Stavanger and the Zagreb rapid. This time the Norwegian changed his approach: “The game was kind of rubbish. I was really just playing old man’s chess, trying to play without tactics whatsoever. It worked out well, can’t complain.” Another wording would be that Carlsen reverted to the style of Grind like a Grandmaster, the instructional book he wrote with his English co-author David Howell.
Meanwhile, the modest Gukesh continues to meditate at the start of every game and to emphasise that he is still working continuously in self-improvement.
Carlsen has now won the $40,000 first prize at Zagreb four times in six years: the other winners were France’s Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Fabiano Caruana of the US. On receiving the trophy he said: “When nobody else has a great performance, my B-game is often enough. Always striving for more, though!”
Final leading Zagreb 2025 scores were Carlsen 22.5/36. Wesley So (US) 20, Gukesh 19.5. There was a third Gukesh v Carlsen game, but that proved a damp squib as the pair opted for a well-known drawing line in the Ruy López Berlin.
Carlsen has other issues with negative potential. Next week at Las Vegas is the third of five tournaments in the $3.5mn Freestyle Grand Slam, the series based on random starting positions for every game. In a qualifier for the final place, Carlsen’s arch-rival Hans Niemann unexpectedly won through.
The next leg of the Grand Slam was planned for Delhi, but it has been cancelled due to a lack of local sponsors and the withdrawal of Gukesh, who has had poor results in Freestyle tournaments. Meanwhile, in a simultaneous announcement, Jan Henric Buettner, the German entrepreneur who has been the public face of Freestyle, resigned as its CEO and will be replaced by Thomas Harsch. This may raise questions about whether Freestyle’s campaign to gain wider acceptance in the chess community is faltering.
Last week’s column highlighted Saturday’s Greater Manchester v Surrey inter-counties final. The 16-board match, played at Syston, Leicestershire, proved a thriller as Greater Manchester, out-rated by a wide margin and facing a team with four international masters, put up a great fight. After four hours of play they were still level at 3.5-3.5, with every completed game a draw. However, Surrey slowly but surely edged ahead and their final winning margin was 9.7, with just a single loss.
Puzzle 2631
IM S Aswath v GM Jorge Ferreira, Sharjah Open 2025. White to move and win.
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