The four-player $412.000 Champions Showdown in St Louis was a historic event, a quadrangular tournament of the super-elite who met each other six times in three days.
Magnus Carlsen was the favourite, but after scoring 3.5/6 on the first day the Norwegian expressed dissatisfaction with his own performance: “I’m not feeling good at all. I scored about two points more than I should have, and I’m happy with that. My level of play was extremely poor.”
Day two, when he won four and lost two, was an improvement: “It was better than yesterday, but I would like to have more control in my games than I did today. I’ll take the result, of course.”
On the final day, Carlsen defeated all three of his opponents, Gukesh Dommaraju with two wins and Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura by a win and a draw, and sounded much more positive: “There are still things here and there that I’m not super happy about, but there was more flow and I felt I was more on top of things, and not missing as many tricks.”
The official result, using the Clutch system where wins on the second day counted two points and wins on the third day counted three, was Carlsen 25.5/36, Caruana 16.5, Nakamura 14, Gukesh 10. This was used to divide up the $412,000 (£313,000) prize fund.
The totals using the traditional scoring method of one for a win and a half for a draw were Carlsen 12.5, Caruana 8.5, Nakamura 8, Gukesh 7. It appears that Carlsen made a special effort against Gukesh, perhaps to demonstrate what could have happened in the world championship match that never was (if Carlsen had taken up his place in the 2026 Candidates and qualified for a challenge to Gukesh’s crown).
In game three between them, Carlsen gave an exquisite display of how to utilise the bishop pair and a space advantage in the endgame. In their sixth game, Carlsen’s black army dominated the entire board.
The time limit for the Champions Showdown was 10 minutes per player per game, plus a five seconds per move increment. That could be called Slow Blitz rather than Rapid and is in line with the general speeding up of time controls launched by Fide’s announcement of a Total Chess World Championship where classical games, which used to be two or two and a half hours per player, will become Fast Classical, just 45 minutes per player plus a 30 seconds increment.
Objectively, the Champions Showdown games, particularly Carlsen’s, are of high quality and show that elite GMs can handle extreme complexities with very little time.
After winning in St Louis, Carlsen flew back to Norway for a rare classical game for his Offerspill club in the Norwegian League. His opponent was IM Frode Elsness, rated 2418 and Carlsen won in 36 moves despite a few inaccuracies.
All four players could take positives from the event. Carlsen proved he is still the No 1, despite the distractions of fatherhood. Caruana had a bad first day due to fatigue from his victory in the previous week’s US Championship, but recovered strongly in the later rounds. Nakamura proved that he is still among the world elite despite his unorthodox preparation of daily streaming plus a diet of games against low-rated opponents.
Gukesh came to St Louis direct from a top board gold medal at the European Club Cup, and then departed immediately for the World Cup in Goa which starts on Saturday. He is recovering from his three defeats in a row in last month’s Fide Grand Swiss and has regained his place in the world top 10.
Quadrangulars are rare in top chess. The most famous was St Petersburg 1895-96, where the world champion Emanuel Lasker won and his US rival Harry Pillsbury contracted syphilis.
There were also two South African quadrangulars in 1979 and 1981, staged in response to the country’s exclusion from international sport. In the first, Viktor Korchnoi won ahead of Wolfgang Unzicker, Tony Miles and Anatoly Lein. A Guardian reader who was then a wallboard operator notes that the demo operator also had the job of replenishing Miles’s jug of milk, requiring up to eight pints during a single game.
Garry Kasparov has joined the debate about Vladimir Kramnik, using sharp words in an interview in Russian to describe the player to whom he lost the world crown a quarter of a century ago.
“Danya [Daniel Naroditsky] was one of the most transparent players online – he streamed, he explained every move, he played blitz at 3000+ for years. To accuse him on the basis of some statistical model that even its creator says is preliminary? That’s not serious chess analysis, that’s character assassination.
Kramnik didn’t just question moves, he questioned integrity without evidence. And when Danya responded calmly, with data, Kramnik doubled down. That’s not how a world champion behaves. That’s how a bitter man behaves.”
Meanwhile, the petition asking Fide to ban Kramnik and strip him of his grandmaster title is approaching 50,000 signatures. For his part, Kramnik has defended his actions in an interview with Al Arabia, while Russian media has broadly supported him.
Scotland’s GM Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant has won the gold medal in the Women’s World Over-50 Championship at Gallipoli, Italy, with a round to spare. The Edinburgh 57-year-old scored an unbeaten 8/10, and the only player who could catch her, Sweden’s Pia Cramling, drew her 10th round game to drop 1.5 points behind.
Arakhamia-Grant was one of the leading players in her native Georgia before she married the Scotland international Jonathan Grant and moved to Edinburgh. She already has a stellar chess career including wins over former world champion Vasily Smyslov and Nakamura, and she was runner-up in the open British Championship in 2006.
IM Sohum Lohia, 16, England’s No 2 junior after GM Shreyas Royal, scored one of the best successes of his career so far on Friday when he shared first prize at the English Chess Federation’s Coventry International Open.
Lohia, China’s IM Wang Hao, and the Czech Republic’s top seeded Vojtech Plat all totalled 7 out of 9. Their tie was not broken, and each received £1,000. English GMs Danny Gormally and Mark Hebden tied for fourth with Ukraine’s GM Alexander Kovchan on 6.5. 77 players competed.
3996: 1 Bf6! Bxf6 2 Qxf4! Bg5 (to stop 3 Qh6 mate) 3 Rxg5 Qd8 4 Rg8+! Resigns due to 4…Rxg8 5 Qh6 mate.
