World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has won the first event on the $1.6 million 2022 Meltwater Champions Chess after defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi with a game to spare on the 2nd day of the final. It was a repeat of the Dubai World Chess Championship match as five hard-fought draws were followed by a victory for Magnus in Game 6. Nepo had chances of hitting back in the next game but instead he went from winning to lost in the space of a few moves. Magnus said his next event will likely be the next Tour event, starting March 19th.
You can replay all the games from the knockout stages of the Airthings Masters using the selector below.
And here’s the final day’s live commentary from Tania Sachdev and Peter Leko…
…and from Kaja Snare, Jovanka Houska and David Howell.
The knockout stages of the Airthings Masters were unusual as we didn’t see tiebreaks once, with Magnus Carlsen wrapping up victory on the 2nd day with a game to spare.
The first game of the final day of the Airthings Masters began just like the day before, with an intensely fought draw. Magnus played the Rossolimo Sicilian and we soon had another complicated strategic struggle.
Did the bishop pair compensate for the damaged pawn structure? It wasn’t clear, but in the end Magnus also decided to give up a bishop to inflict doubled c-pawns. In the final stages it was Magnus who had any chances in the position.
The computer suggests that 38…Qe3 here, or in similar positions later, was the best chance, but it wasn’t obvious why, and would have required extreme precision. Instead, with around a minute to Nepo’s four, Magnus played 38…Qf4+ and would go on to force a draw by repetition.
If you also count the four draws on Day 1, that made it five fighting draws, just as we’d seen in the World Championship match in Dubai. Back then it was in Game 6, with the white pieces, that Magnus won an epic game, and the floodgates opened.
It would be similar in the Airthings Masters final, except rather than the longest World Championship game ever played we got a tense battle that was ruined for Ian Nepomniachtchi by a one-move blunder.
Nepo had over 10 minutes to Carlsen’s 4 and would have had an equal position after 24…Ne6. He could also play 24…Ng6 or 24…Qd5, threatening mate-in-1, but instead went for 24…Rad8? If the queen had to move Black would be winning, with Qd5 next, but Magnus had no need to move his queen, since 25.gxf4! simply won a piece!
Magnus would later comment:
I think I kind of did the same [as on Day 1], trying to play complicated chess, but also making a lot of mistakes, which is pretty much the same as I did yesterday, but today he clearly made a serious blunder in the 2nd game. I don’t know really what happened, what he missed right there. That’s probably up to him to answer.
There was no way back, and on move 50, a move before checkmate, Ian resigned.
That meant that Nepomniachtchi now had to win at least one of the remaining two games. It was a tough ask against the World Champion, but the opening to Game 3 went as well as Ian could have hoped for.
Magnus playing the Taimanov Sicilian seemed to backfire, as he spent 7 minutes on his clock getting the same bad position as Jorden van Foreest had against Vishy Anand in Round 1 of the 2021 Croatia Grand Chess Tour. Only 17.Bxh5!? (capturing a knight) was a new move, since Vishy had played the computer’s preferred 17.Bd4.
In Croatia, Vishy had gone for a flawed brilliancy and was objectively losing before he went on to win. That illustrated the complexity of the position, with Magnus commenting:
In the 3rd game he actually had a very promising position, but it was very complicated and, as we’ve seen over the last couple of days, having a good position in a complicated situation has by no means been a guarantee that you win the game, so I didn’t really feel like anything was decided there at any point.
In fact there wasn’t long to wait. 22.b3! was apparently the best move for Nepo, but instead he went from clearly better to clearly worse with 22.Nf6+?!
After 22…Bxf6 23.gxf6 Rg8! it was essential to defend with 24.Rd2, since after 24.Rhe1? Rg2! Magnus was suddenly completely winning.
Now if 24.Rd2 Magnus could have boldly played 24…Qxf6!, since 25.Rxd5 loses to 25…Rcxc2! and there’s no defence for White.
In the game we saw 25.Qa7, but the cold-blooded 25…Qd7! extinguished all White’s hopes. Play continued 26.Qd4 Rcxc2 27.Bc1.
There are many ways to win, but Magnus picked the fastest: 27…Rxc1+! 28.Kxc1 Qc6+! 29.Kb1 Qa4! 30.Rd2 Bxa2+! and Ian resigned the game and match. Magnus allowed himself the briefest of celebrations.
So after taking five tournaments to win an event on the 2021 Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, Magnus had started the 2022 Tour win a win, his third Tour victory in a row. How did he feel?
It feels good, of course. I think these things are always going to be about whether you can perform on that particular day and so on. My games were going in a positive direction here. I felt that I was playing better as the tournament went along, and fortunately that was enough. I do think he didn’t show his best today, though. Overall in the tournament he’d done very well, but today was not his day.
While Magnus took $31,250 ($25,000 for winning the knockout and $6,250 for wins and draws in the Prelims) Ian also picked up $22,250 for finishing runner-up and being the top performer in the Prelims ($15,000 + $7,250).
Magnus expanded on his play:
It’s on the upturn. I don’t feel like I performed much better than I used to do last season in the knockouts, but I didn’t have any really bad days, which is often what plagued me last time. I didn’t play perfectly at all, but I didn’t feel at any moment that my brain wasn’t really working or anything. I was just playing complicated chess and making mistakes, so it’s on the upturn, that’s for sure, and it feels really good to win the tournament which started in a difficult way for me with the Preliminaries, where I was nowhere near the top and didn’t qualify until the penultimate round.
Magnus also felt it had been a good start for the Tour.
We saw a lot of new and also young players do well here, and make their mark on the tournament. The final of course ended up being between two older rivals, so it’s an interesting clash both between styles and to some extent generations as well, and it was a very good start to the tour. I think it was an excellent tournament overall.
Carlsen had started the tournament with COVID and said that now his goal was to “just try and recover a bit more and enjoy life” until he’ll probably be back in action next on March 19th for the 2nd tournament on the Tour.
For Ian, meanwhile, there are uncertain times ahead. He spoke out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s likely there will be pressure to boycott Russian players from all sport, regardless of their personal views.
The first test will be the Belgrade Grand Prix, the 2nd leg of the 2022 FIDE Grand Prix, which starts already on Tuesday March 1st. Alexander Grischuk and Dmitry Andreikin, who have been notable for protesting against Vladimir Putin even before recent events, and Nikita Vitiugov, who criticised the invasion on Twitter, are joined by Vladimir Fedoseev and Alexandr Predke as the biggest contingent of any nationality.
It remains to be seen if they’ll be allowed to play, and how easily they’ll manage to travel, but if things do go ahead as normal we’ll have live commentary from Jan Gustafsson and Peter Svidler from 15:00 CET right here on chess24.
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