The world No. 1 decimated the field in the final event of this year’s Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, scoring 20 points out of a possible 21 in a field of super-Grandmasters. He also had the time to squeeze in an unrelated online blitz match against U.S. phenom Daniel Naroditsky, where he also won 46 games out of 72 played.
Though he was already coming into the event with the overall Tour win in the bag, Carlsen left nothing to chance in the final event of the series. Featuring the best-performing players throughout the year-long sequence of tournaments, the final in San Francisco was a partly-offline event.
Though these events still pit the players against each other in an esports-like environment where they play the games on computers, the tension is always higher when the opponents are there in the flesh. This time, only half of the field could make it to the LAN event in person, with four of the eight players competing from the comfort of their homes.
Not that any of this could slow down Carlsen, mind: the world number one has been in imperious form throughout the Tour, and this was perhaps his most convincing set of matches yet, winning against all of his opponents, dispatching all but one of them in the rapid portion of the games, with no blitz tiebreakers required. With this result, he crossed the 2900 rating barrier for the season based on the (somewhat inflated) Tour rankings, with a performance rating of 2957 for the entire tournament.
He even had room for some semi-trollish opening choices like 1. b3 against Praggnanandhaa in game two of the sixth round, which secured his tournament win with one match to spare:
Though he cut it close, he still managed to find a win in this position. Nevertheless, he did confess in the post-match interview that he was “out of it” on the day.
Carlsen’s dominance in this year’s tour cannot be overstated. Not only did he clean house in this tournament, but he also won five out of the nine tournaments in total, scoring 242.5 points in total on the leaderboards. The runner-up, Jan-Krzysztof Duda was the only other player to win more than one event, but even he could only rack up 162.5 points.
Carlsen also had the time to play a marathon session of blitz games against Daniel Naroditsky on chess.com before his last round in the tournament. He won 46 games and drew eight, with just eighteen losses in the American’s column, but even this still cost Carlsen 26 points because of just how high his rating is. To compare and contrast, when Alireza Firouzja tried something like this in the middle of the Candidates Tournament, he was blown off the board by eventual winner Ian Nepomniachtchi the next day.
World No. 8 Wesley So, winner of the recent inaugural Chess.com Global Championship, finished in a distant second place with thirteen points out of a possible 21. Another notable storyline from the tournament was Anish Giri’s underperformance: the seventh-highest-rated player in the world has finished joint-last in the tournament, capping a disappointing year where he hasn’t managed to qualify for the Candidates Tournament at all. With a new generation of energetic youngsters hot on his heels, the 28-year-old Dutchman will need to buck up his ideas heading into 2023.
The Tour Finals capped off a turbulent year for the chess world. Though multiple top 10 players in the world were participating, this year’s Tour was not as star-studded as previous seasons. Russian grandmasters were no longer invited after the country’s invasion of Ukraine and players like Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana focused on chess.com’s online tournaments instead.
It remains to be seen what’s next for the Champions Chess Tour. With offline chess returning to its previous prominence, the event no longer serves as the sole outlet for elite players to square off against one another in a competitive setting, as was the case during the pandemic. With chess.com’s acquisition of the Play Magnus Group, it also remains to be seen how this tour fits into their existing slate of tournament offerings.
