It is the last game of the World Blitz championship in Samarkand. Magnus Carlsen faces the Armenian Levon Aronian, a very tough opponent. A few draws can help you become champion again, but a blitz or blitz game (three minutes plus two seconds of increment per move) is always an indecipherable adventure. The position is safe after the first moves, so while his rival thinks, Carlsen stands up and watches the game of the only player who can leave him without his third consecutive world title in this modality (the seventh of his career), the second double followed along with the rapid modality (he has won five), the seventeenth World Cup of his career. There he realizes that Dubov will have to sign a draw. So he sits back down nervous, as nervous as someone like him can be, and forces the tie that gives him everything mentioned and much more. Because what Carlsen achieved in Samarkand, in the same year in which he gave up fighting for the title in classics, is something inhuman.
Once again, and it is impossible to count them, Carlsen shows that he is the best. The best in all categories, the best at any time, in any phase of the game. Only one defeat has occurred between the two championships held this week. More than 30 games against the best in the world. The elite of world chess, who paraded, one by one, with more pain than glory before him. Playing against Carlsen is already a source of pride. The admiration of his rivals is proportional to the desire they have to defeat him. But almost no one succeeds. When time is short and the position is more complex, the genie appears and dismantles any attack until another defeat is inflicted.
“I feel relieved and exhausted at the same time after a very hard day, bathed in adrenaline the entire time. The last two nights I have slept badly. On the other hand, it is also true that this will have been the same for everyone, suffering to reach the end; I think no one has performed at their highest level. So I feel very happy to have achieved it!”
On this last day things did not start well for him. The Frenchman Vachier-Lagrave defeated him in a surprising way in the first game of the day. “After this defeat he thought that he was not going to win the tournament. I went for a walk along the shore of a lake, and the fresh air and sunshine made me feel better. Somehow I have managed to recover, by thinking about other things between games, and thus I have won six in a row.”
In his favor it has played out that his greatest rival in the tournament, the Russian Dúbov, was thinking more about money than the glory of victory, and decided to be conservative in several games to secure the substantial prize that comes with finishing among the first. Added to this is that yesterday he agreed to a premeditated draw with Ian Nepomniatchi, an embarrassing spectacle that FIDE punished by subtracting the half point achieved, which would have forced the tiebreaker against the Norwegian. That does not detract from the feat of Carlsen, who would have been a favorite in said fight.
For the Norwegian, “the punishment is correct and dissuasive because it sets a precedent for behavior like this, where the fixing is previously agreed upon and recorded.” And he adds: “I don’t know why board offers are allowed to begin with. In any case, it also seems good to me that they have not been expelled from the tournament.”
After demonstrating his abominable superiority once again, now all that remains is to know if he will want to participate in the Candidates Tournament that could offer him a chance to challenge the world champion Ding Liren. Pending official confirmation, those classified for the Candidates Tournament are: the Russian Niepómniashi; the Indians Vidit, Praggnanandhaa and Gukesh; the Americans Caruana and Nakamura; the Frenchman Firouzja; and the Azerbaijani Abásov, who would replace the Norwegian.