Magnus Carlsen has qualified for this weekend’s semi-finals in his $250,000 online elite invitational, but Norway’s world champion, 29, now faces strong and ambitious rivals in the context of his own erratic form.
Carlsen won several games in fine style in the all-play-all preliminaries, but also suffered eight defeats, three of them to China’s world No 3, Ding Liren, who he meets again in Saturday’s semi-final. The match starts at 3pm, and can be viewed free and live online at chess24.com with move by move grandmaster and computer commentaries.
The reigning US champion, Hikaru Nakamura, defeated the world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, 4-2 in the all-American first semi-final on Friday. The pair finished 2-2 in 15-minute rapid but Nakamura won 2-0 in five-minute blitz.
Scores in the group phase were Nakamura (US) and Ding (China) 15 match points, Carlsen (Norway) and Caruana (US) 13, Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia) 8, Alireza Firouzja (ex-Iran) and Anish Giri (Netherlands) 7, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France) 6 (13.5).
Carlsen won his first four matches impressively, but then, with his semi-final qualification almost assured, he became too careless, relaxed or erratic and suffered reverses using offbeat openings.
His first black game against Ding began with a dubious Scandinavian Defence 1 e4 Nc6 2 Nf3 d5 3 exd5 Qxd5, and his second with the outlandish 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 h5?! Playing White, Carlsen lost with the King’s Gambit 1 e4 e5 2 f4.
His worst opening disaster came against Nepomniachtchi, Russia’s world No 4, which began 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Bc4?! Nxe4 6 Qh5 e6. Here White should play 7 Bb5+, but after several minutes thought Carlsen chose 7 Nxe6?? Bxe6 8 Bxe6 Qe7! when Black wins a piece and the game, although White continued for another 20 moves before resigning. “I just completely blanked and couldn’t remember what to do,” said Carlsen.
The same unsound sacrifice at e6 occurred 56 years ago during Bobby Fischer’s 1964 US simultaneous tour. Fischer was Black and instantly found the refutation.
Ding’s performance was sharp, confident, and completely recovered from his disastrous over-the-board Candidates where his play suffered from enforced quarantines at home and in Russia. He won in 16 moves against the Frenchman who led the Candidates when it was abandoned. Ding could be the favourite Saturday, but Carlsen said: “Now it’s dead serious. From now on you will see me from a completely different side.”
Just two days after the Carlsen Invitational ends, the global chess body, Fide, launches the Nations Cup with teams from China, United States, Europe, Russia, India and the Rest of the World. China are the favourites, fielding their top four men plus Hou Yifan and Ju Wenjun for the women’s board.
While Carlsen’s tournament has been played on chess24, which he partly owns, the Nations Cup will be on chess.com, which was already a partner in the 2019 Isle of Man world championship qualifier. Their website rivalry is set to intensify, as neither publicises the other’s tournaments.
A third major site, lichess.org, which is user-friendly and the best for newcomers to internet chess, hosted Carlsen’s marathon bullet match against Firouzja and is the venue for Britain’s online 4NCL league, now in its fourth week and where matches can be viewed every Tuesday evening.
Carlsen’s absence from the Nations Cup could mark the beginning of a fundamental split. A few years ago he stated that the world championship needed a new format, much like what has been on show on chess24 this week, and he has also conspicuously failed to confirm that he will defend his global crown in Dubai in December 2021, which is Fide’s current plan.
For its first 60 years the world champion decided his own challenger, and some worthy candidates were rejected because they could not raise funds while lesser lights were sometimes accepted because they had backers. There was another hiatus from 1993 to 2005 when Garry Kasparov broke with Fide and there were two rival claimants. It could have happened in 1975, too, if the Bobby Fischer-Anatoly Karpov negotiations had been successful.
Now, as in the era of Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca, and Kasparov, there is a dominant champion, while due to Covid-19 the official world body has been forced to substantially curtail its programme. In particular the Candidates tournament to decide Carlsen’s challenger was stopped at halfway and remains in limbo with resumption unlikely before 2021. Could Carlsen try to fill this vacuum with his own online world championship series?
3669: 1…Bxe4 2 Qxe4 Qxe4 3 Rxe4 Rxh4! when if 4 Rxh4 Bxf2+ with Bxh4 and the extra bishop wins.