Magnus Carlsen is still the current world No. 1 and his position as the best chess player is still obvious, but his authority has been challenged this year, especially from the young crop of Indian Grandmasters.
Carlsen has been facing the heat, especially since he criticised D Gukesh’s World Championship victory over Ding Liren, downplaying the quality of the showdown.
Carlsen has also been at war with FIDE, and also took shots at Viswanathan Anand, who is vice-president. At Norway Chess, Carlsen eased past Gukesh in the opener, but then the Indian GM had the last laugh. He responded in style in a later round to beat Carlsen, but it wasn’t enough as the Norwegian won the competition. The Round 6 defeat also saw Carlsen slam his table in frustration ad it became a viral meme.
Then ahead of the SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz Croatia, Carlsen mocked Gukesh and called him ‘one of the weaker players’. Once again, Gukesh had the last laugh, beating Carlsen in the Rapid round. But then the Norwegian bounced back in the Blitz stage to beat Gukesh.
Magnus Carlsen shellshocked and broken
Speaking to the YouTube channel of Freestyle Chess, Carlsen blamed it on a complete collapse of his skills in Las Vegas, where he also lost to R Praggnanandhaa. He said, “I could have scraped through of course with some help but it would have been completely underserved. So, it was a complete collapse and yeah, sometimes you have one bad day and I’ve had that in Freestyle before in the preliminaries, but then there’s been a bit of a wider margin to get through. This time it wasn’t. It’s not an excuse. I should make it regardless.”
“I just wanted to get out of the bubble, especially when things start going south a little bit. I feel like I’m just kind of left in my own head a little bit and it would have been probably a little bit easier to shake off if I could talk to somebody very familiar.”
He also claimed that his ‘nervous system’ began to collapse during his recent games. “It’s been a thing recently that when things are going well, I play really well and then I’m not really able to sort of change bad trends. And when sort of my nervous system starts collapsing, then it’s all quite bad. I have bad days in pretty much every tournament. It’s just, you know, sometimes they happen at inopportune moments.”
“I haven’t felt – in Zagreb (at SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz Croatia tournament) or here – at the top of at the top of my game, but atleast, now that there’s zero pressure that I don’t have anything to play for, at least I can maybe enjoy the games a little bit more. Today more than anything else, I was just trying to play fun chess and play dynamically from the start and that worked out well. So that’s the advantage of playing Freestyle Chess that even if you don’t have anything to play for, it’s kind of a little bit easier to play kind of for the love of the game than in some other forms of chess,” he added.
Carlsen has seen a dip of form this year, and he lost to German GM Vincent Keymer in the semi-finals of Weissenhaus Freestyle Chess Grand Slam.