In round six Carlsen was lost against Nakamura and salvaged a draw. In round seven he was lost against Adams and came back to win. It looks like he tempted fate once too often.
I’m hoping Caruana is his challenger in 2018. Unless Carlsen snaps out of it, it might not matter who the challenger is. Of course, Carlsen is beginning to get a bit long in the tooth…
In his post game comments Ian mentioned that Magnus was clearly sick, and that it is hard to play your best when you have a sore throat and such. In round seven Carlsen was dead lost with White after 13 moves, and only survived due to uncharacteristically weak play later by Adams. In round eight he had a promising, possibly winning attack against Nepo, and then made oversight after oversight to lose. That kind of thing is so uncharacteristic of Carlsen’s play that one has to think his poor health had a lot to do with it. I would not expect him to play like this when he defends his title next November.
Tongue in cheek. But, this is the age of 12 year old GMs. At the top levels 30 seems more like the old 40-45.
No question that Carlsen is feeling under the weather. However, this isn’t the first time this year that he’s shown a lack of form. theguardian.com/sport/2017/ … ard-barden
His play against Karjakin in NYC was less than dominating. I do hope Caruana is the next challenger. If he is, win or lose, it would be nice to see an exciting match. With a 12 game format, that’s not likely.
Maybe we are back to the times when the champion was the “first among equals.” Fischer and Kasparov were significantly more dominant in their eras and rarely finished below the very top places in tournaments. They also had a bigger rating spread between themselves and the rest of the players in the top 10. All of the top players struggled against their lower opponents in recent qualifying events. The influence of computer software and databases has spread to the masses making it harder for strong players to demonstrate superiority. In the “Wonderland” of chess one has to run faster and faster to end up in the same place.
Something seems amiss with Magnus.Per a Chessbase article he was extremely rude to Maurice Ashley after his 8th round game.Maybe it is the illness he is dealing with-but his play has been off (in classical chess) for over a year now and his apparent rudeness seems out of character as well.
He just turned 27.