Magnus Carlsen Proper Old Guy Move In Win Over Alireza Firouzja

It’s starting to happen again. That juggernaut called Magnus Carlsen is starting to gather momentum to chase another title at Norway Chess, however absurd it sounds this time around. After all, it was only yesterday that Carlsen was at the bottom of the standings.

A notorious slow starter at tournaments these days, it would have felt like Carlsen had left it too late to power another title challenge. Despite experiencing an unprecedented three losses in five games — to Alireza Firouzja, R Praggnanandhaa and Wesley So — so far at the tournament in Oslo, Carlsen is just four points behind tournament leader Wesley So after he took down the French-Iranian Firouzja in a classical game by playing “old man chess”.

Walking into the game on Sunday, Carlsen was asked to rate from 1 to 10 how much of a mood he was in to fight. “1.5,” Carlsen had shrugged before walking away.

But on the board, he had opted for an old-school opening trick to try and catch the young Firouzja off-guard.

“I’m trying a proper old guy move again today, just playing something that was popular before Alireza started playing chess,” laughed Carlsen in an early visit to the confession booth on Sunday.

Carlsen then explained that the line he had pulled out against Firouzja had been sharpened by his team during the world chess championship battle against Sergey Karjakin (in New York back in 2016). He had played the line in his first game with black against the Russian challenger.

“But people stopped playing this line,” Carlsen added. “Because it doesn’t work! Let’s see when he knows.”

The opening did make Firouzja think, as the Norwegian world no 1 carved up a near-15-minute advantage by the 13th move.

The game saw Firouzja put down his injured right leg from its elevated chair. He handed Carlsen an advantage with an error on the 28th move before making multiple errors to increase Carlsen’s advantage on the board, until he resigned on move 55.

Carlsen’s win came on a day both the young Indian challengers — world champion D Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa — had suffered defeats. Thanks to Sunday’s results at Oslo’s Deichman Bjørvika, Carlsen shot past the Indian duo into fourth place. While Pragg lost to Wesley So, Gukesh slipped to another defeat, this time to his world chess championship second, Vincent Keymer.

Carlsen can push for a run at the title with four more games remaining in the tournament. Two of those games will be against the Indian prodigies.

The day, in fact, saw the other two Indians in action — Divya Deshmukh and Koneru Humpy — also lose, with the latter losing in Armageddon against Bibisara Assaubayeva after the classical game ended in a short 15-move draw. Bibisara’s win, coupled with Deshmukh’s loss to women’s world champion Ju Wenjun, meant that the Kazakh grandmaster overtook Deshmukh at the top of the women’s leaderboard.

(The writer is in Oslo at the invitation of Norway Chess)

Amit Kamath is Assistant Editor at The Indian Express and is based in Mumbai. He primarily writes on chess and Olympic sports, and co-hosts the Game Time podcast, a weekly offering from Express Sports. He also writes a weekly chess column, On The Moves. ... Read More