17-Year-Old Beats Magnus Carlsen in World Rapid Chess Championship
But players only get three minutes for all moves (plus a 2-second-per-move increment) in the World Blitz Chess Championship.
So what happened? World chess champion Magnus Carlsen entered both events, and…
A little-known 17-year-old from Uzbekistan made a clean sweep of Magnus Carlsen and the global chess elite on Tuesday, incidentally setting a world age record. Nodirbek Abdusattorov won the World Rapid championship in Warsaw, claiming en route the scalps of Magnus Carlsen and the No 1’s last two challengers, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi…
After 21 rounds of three-minute games on Wednesday and Thursday, France’s Maxime Vachier-Lagrave defeated Poland’s Jan-Krzysztof Duda in a tie-break to win the World Blitz title. The 18-year-old world No 2, Alireza Firouzja, was third but Carlsen was well adrift in 12th place. He said: “Some days you just don’t have it. I was nowhere near close to the level I needed to be today.”
At 17 years three months Abdusattorov becomes the youngest ever world champion in open competition… After 13 rounds he was in a quadruple tie on 9.5 points with Carlsen, Caruana and Nepomniachtchi, but the regulations excluded Carlsen and Caruana from the play-off due to their inferior tie-breaks. An angry Carlsen denounced the rules as “idiotic. Either all players on the same amount of points join the play-off or no one does…”
[In the final play-off game] Abdusattorov easily drew with Black, then won the second game despite twice missing mate in two near the end.
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