Magnus Carlsen now has a 6:3 lead with just five games of the World Chess Championship to go after Ian Nepomniachtchi collapsed in Game 9. A tense, fighting game was suddenly over when Ian blundered a piece in one move, leaving no hope of avoiding a 3rd loss in four games. "Is he nuts, that is insane!" said Anish Giri, who had been showing the possible blunder when it appeared on the board. Ian now needs to win three of the next five games against a player who has lost only two classical games in matches over the course of his eight years as World Champion.
Ian Nepomniachtchi cut off his man bun and came to the game with Sergey Karjakin, but once again he blundered and the match now looks completely gone | photo: Eric Rosen, FIDE
You can replay all the games from the 2021 FIDE World Chess Championship match in Dubai using the selector below.
Check out the day's live commentary and press conference with Judit Polgar and Anish Giri...
...and with the Champions Chess Tour team of David Howell, Kaja Snare and Jovanka Houska.
And here's Danny King's video recap of the day's action.
“I have to expect that the match will enter a phase that will be a bit different — a desperate opponent is a very dangerous opponent!” said Magnus Carlsen on the eve of Game 9, but he probably wasn’t prepared for the visual change.
Ian had decided to cut off the man bun that had accompanied his rise to the Top 5 and a World Championship challenge. Ian said it was a coincidence and he’d wanted to do it for a while, which we'll take with a grain of salt, but Magnus approved.
It’s very typical after a free day — change your appearance and try and mix up something, so I think that was a good idea!
Magnus, meanwhile, had stuck to his usual rest-day routine.
The hair wasn’t the only change Ian made, however, as 2016 World Championship challenger Sergey Karjakin for the first time accompanied him to a game.
There would also be a change on the chessboard, with Nepo finally abandoning the 1.e4 that had led to four Anti-Marshalls and four draws. His weapon of choice was the English Opening, 1.c4, which was made by 16-year-old Julius Baer Challengers Chess Tour winner Praggnanandhaa and then allowed to remain on the board.
Praggnanandhaa was accompanied by chess24's VP of Operations, Ayelen Martinez | photo: Eric Rosen, FIDE
Magnus later replied when asked why he’d smiled after 1.c4:
You expect everything, but obviously it was a slight surprise, and I couldn’t know if Pragg had any prior knowledge or he was just making the move he would have made at the board, so that’s why I smiled.
Magnus spent over a minute on 1…e6 and then after 2.g3 d5 3.Bg2 he spent another four minutes on 3…d4!?, another of the early surprises he’s specialised in during the match. It was a move first played by Akiba Rubinstein all the way back in 1911, and with some pedigree at World Championship level.
It wasn’t, however, an obvious choice given the current match situation, when all Magnus needed to do was avoid defeat.
I had some conflicting emotions. d4 was what I’d been preparing for the match, so I wasn’t sure whether I would go for that or anything more solid, but the main problem was that I couldn’t remember what was going on later there.
Magnus called it “a bit dumb” that he went for it anyway despite not being able to recall the details, and after 4…Nc6 5.0-0 Bc5!? we had a very lively position on the board. The struggle with memory resolved the paradox of the World Champion’s time usage and the fact that he should have been “in book” if he’d chosen this particular line in a World Championship match.
The first new move of the game came on move 9, but everything still seemed as if it could have come straight out of Team Magnus’s playbook until 14…a3!? looked to be a slip. 14…e5! was the tricky silicon recommendation.
The recommended move after 14…a3 was the temporary pawn sacrifice 15.b4!. Ian commented afterwards:
I wouldn’t evaluate it as crushing, but very promising. I guess after 15.bxa3 this provides some more chances for Black to hold, but still it’s pretty one-sided.
“Obviously it was a critical option, and if the engine says it was good for White, who am I to disagree?” said Magnus, but in fact the response he said he had in mind, 15…Nxb4 16.Rb1 b6!, looks decent for Black.
So it wasn’t so much that Ian had missed a win, but the speed with which he played 15.bxa3 was a hint that not everything was right with the Russian no. 1.
The other thing you could point to was the evaluation of the position. After the game, when he had probably got some pointers from his team, Ian was still under the impression that he’d had a very promising position, while the more accurate assessment seems to have been the one made by Magnus.
I have no major complaints about the position I had. I think it’s a bit worse, but to actually show anything serious for White there I think requires very, very energetic and precise play, and the most likely outcome is always that Black eventually equalises, and I think that’s kind of what happened in the game as well.
Until the blunder it was a hard-fought game where anything was possible | photo: Niki Riga, FIDE
Speed, however, can also be a weapon, and when Ian went for 19.h4!? it gained him an over half-hour lead on the clock.
While thinking over his move our team in Oslo spotted Magnus adjust a piece, though the World Champion was understandably bemused when it was brought up as an issue in the post-game press conference.
Magnus was more concerned with the position, and came up with the plan of dealing with his problem bishop on c8 by playing the subtle 19…Bd7 20.Ne5 Be8, when after 21.Qe3!? things were getting tense.
Here the lack of time perhaps helped Magnus, since he stumbled on a good plan for the wrong reason. He went for 21…Qb4! 22.Reb1 Nxe5! 23.dxe5 Ng4 (23…Nd7 was the move our commentators favoured) only to be shocked by what Ian called the “very smart” 24.Qe1!
Magnus confessed afterwards he’d just missed this move, telling Tania Sachdev, “I wasn’t intending to give up a pawn in that particular manner!”
Magnus elaborated:
I was considering all the other queen moves that don’t trade queens, I thought I’d fortify my knight with h5, and I thought I’m better, and then Qe1 was a shock at first, because I realised I’m just losing a pawn, but I quickly stabilised and evaluated the position as just probably a pretty clear draw at that point.
And later he converted the situation into an aphorism:
It turned out, as frankly happens pretty often, that good positional moves tend to work out well even if you’ve missed something.
24…Qxe1+ was the only good response, and Magnus only delayed four minutes in making the move, while Ian played almost instantly as he grabbed a pawn with 25.Rxe1 h5 (to give the knight a retreat square, since the threat was f3, winning the piece) 26.Bxb7.
Then, to everyone’s shock, Magnus made just one more move before the sky fell in on his opponent, 26…Ra4!?
After 27.f3 Nh6 28.Be4! Magnus is not winning the pawn back since 28…Rxc4 is met by 29.Rec1! and the c7-pawn falls. Ian wistfully commented afterwards:
Black should still be precise to hold this draw, so somehow it’s quite interesting that you can blunder such a position in one move. It’s difficult to sum up.
Disaster struck with 27.c5??, a move even more catastrophic than 21…b5? in the previous game.
Ian played it after just four minutes of thought, when Anish Giri had been in the middle of showing why you couldn’t play the move.
It was immediately obvious from Magnus’s facial expression that he saw 27…c6! was trapping the bishop, and he spent just three minutes confirming he’d missed nothing before playing it. Those three minutes were spent by Ian in blissful ignorance in his rest room. He said afterwards, “I was quite happy — I somehow thought that 27.c5 Bb5 is mandatory.”
In a World Championship match there's nowhere to hide | photo: Eric Rosen, FIDE
Ian had made what Magnus called an “extremely careless” move and a “very, very strange lapse” since he was assuming that c6 never worked since the b3-knight can always jump into c5 and defend the bishop.
What he’d overlooked was that his move 27.c5?? occupied that square, so that after 27…c6 there was no longer an escape. He reflected, “c5 is even funny, that there is a way to blunder this position in one move — who could know!?” He also called it “sort of bad luck”, but the “absurd” that Magnus settled on in the press conference summed it up. Magnus was asked to explain that term.
You don’t expect to basically win a piece for nothing at this level. What can I say? As he said, it’s also a bit of bad luck, that he doesn’t even have any try that gives him any chances, but I think “absurd” actually covers it pretty nicely.
Of course no technical explanation of the blunder could really suffice, with Magnus telling Tania:
I think it’s the tension, for sure. Also that Ian is probably a bit more prone to blundering than some other opponents, but it happened to Vishy as well, that he also made some uncharacteristic errors at the end, so pressure gets to everybody.
There was also another potential factor that neither player really wanted to mention, for obvious reasons — Magnus. Scottish GM Jonathan Rowson had written about what happened to Vishy.
If Ian had been able to reset himself fast enough in Game 8 he might have had genuine chances of saving that game after he blundered a pawn, and it was a lesson he seemed to have learned by Game 9.
He thought for 19 minutes and returned to the board playing decent moves, but the problem was that this time the best moves in the position simply weren’t good enough. He’d blundered a full piece and once again it was more about coming to terms with loss.
Ian had what looked like an impressive positional grip on the position… until you counted the pieces.
For Magnus it was just about conversion, though it felt as though the absolute precision with which he finished things off was also a statement. He wasn’t just going for something rock-solid but showing his calculation was firing on all cylinders as he chose the ruthless 36…Nxg3! 37.Na4 c5! 38.a7 Rd8 39.Nxc5 Ra8 and, with absolutely nothing to hope for, Ian threw in the towel.
Magnus had won three of the last four games to open up a gigantic 3-point lead, and though the World Champion can’t retain his title mathematically until Friday’s Game 11 at the earliest, it would take a collapse of mammoth proportions for him now not to win his 5th World Championship match.
“It’s obviously looking great now,” Magnus put it, while on Twitter, he commented:
It was a day of short tweets. The strange end meant the game didn’t even earn a GG from Anish.
While one of Anish’s earlier tweets at the time of the blunder…
…was picked up by Ian’s second:
The press conference was the painful experience some of us still remember from the 2013 World Championship match when we first heard Norwegian journalists addressing Vishy Anand after losses. Little has changed since.
There were some innovative suggestions for how to handle the situation.
You can mount a defence of blunt questions…
…but there were few surprises on offer. “It’s worse than I expected” Ian said of the match situation, and “it’s been better” of how he felt after the blunder.
Magnus said his win was “no style points awarded”, and that he preferred the hard-earned win in Game 6 to the two wins that followed:
Yeah, I think that goes without saying, but in the standings they look the same. I think that goes for everybody that earning a victory through really hard work is more rewarding than getting one handed to you by your opponent. Actually that’s not the case for everybody. I remember Donner wrote in his book that he appreciated a game won by luck a lot more than a game won by skill, but for me I definitely feel a lot more satisfied when I actually win a good game, but I’ll take it!
Magnus is on the brink of defending his title for a 4th time | photo: Eric Rosen, FIDE
Does Magnus feel sorry for his opponent?
It’s the World Championship! Basically you prefer to beat an opponent who’s playing at his very best, but if he’s not, you take it, any day of the week.
A dream week for Magnus had also ended by his achieving what was perhaps his “stretch goal” before the match began — not just winning but removing Ian’s bragging rights as the one top player of his generation or before to have maintained a plus score against the World Champion. Nepomniachtchi went into the match with 4 wins to Carlsen’s 1 in classical chess, but the score is now 4:4. How does that feel?
That’s nice to hear. I think sort of the same happened in the match against Vishy, that I kind of corrected my score against him as well.
What now, for the match? Well, if Ian is going to take it to a playoff he needs to beat Magnus at least three times in the next five games, inflicting more World Championship match defeats on Magnus than he’s suffered in the last five matches combined. That feels, to put it mildly, unlikely, but Nepo also doesn’t have the opportunity to end the misery just yet. If he were to lose in Game 10 he would still have a rest day to reflect before the match would be over unless he won Friday’s Game 11.
Sometimes you can only laugh | photo: Niki Riga, FIDE
Can Ian motivate himself for an unlikely comeback? Well, he has the consolation that, as he commented, “during these games I wasn’t outplayed one single time.” It’s more or less true, but doesn’t really matter, since blunders and avoiding them is such a critical part of chess. At least there’s nothing to lose, and if he did manage to land a punch on Wednesday things would suddenly liven up again!
Don’t miss the game live right here on chess24 from 16:30 local time (7:30 ET, 13:30 CET).
See also:
We respect your privacy and data protection guidelines. Some components of our site require cookies or local storage that handles personal information.
Using chess24 requires the storage of some personal data, as set out below. You can find additional information in our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer and Terms of Website Use. Please note that your data settings can be changed at any time by clicking on the Data Settings link in the footer at the bottom of our website.
Comments 16
Be the first to comment!