Currently the chess world has turn into a playground for controversies, and followers have been handled to at least one incident after one other in fast succession. The most recent is the continued feud happening between FIDE and Freestyle Chess, and it has reached epic proportions.
Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen poses for an image.(Utpal Sarkar)
Followers additionally haven’t nonetheless forgotten Magnus Carlsen’s controversies at 2024’s year-ending Fast and Blitz Championship. The Norwegian was first concerned in a denims scandal through the Fast Championship, which noticed him pull out of the match. In the meantime, he reached the ultimate of the Blitz Championship, and controversy hit as soon as once more as he shared the title with Russian GM Ian Nepomniachtchi. However what angered followers was that Carlsen was caught on digital camera urging his opponent to play quick attracts if the FIDE failed to simply accept their demand of sharing the title. The incident additionally despatched social media right into a state of meltdown, with many followers accusing the pair of fixing the end result. Many followers, present GMs additionally identified examples in different sports activities, the place a winner is all the time determined and the title isn’t shared.
Talking on the Take Take Take utility, Carlsen lately gave extra readability into the explanations behind his actions on the Blitz ultimate. The World No. 1 was requested if the choice to share the title was attributable to his lack of drive, he replied, “I mean, it’s not a disrespectful question at all. I mean, I’m very open about the fact that I don’t have quite the same drive as I did earlier. It did creep in at some point that I felt like after the comeback he made that he would have been very hard done by if he didn’t get his first world championship title because of this. Apart from that, you know, I was, of course, earlier thinking that I was going to win the match. I won the first two games, and I was feeling quite good, and he made a very good comeback. At that point, of course, my confidence was shaken a bit. We played three really high-quality draws in the tiebreak as well.”
“So I wasn’t feeling confident that I was gonna win so it was a combination of that like feeling that it would be a nice solution partly also you know wanting to get out of there with the world championship title and I honestly thought that it would be a nice moment and I still think that that it was. Also, I think people got to realize that at that point, like, you know, you’re not always thinking very clearly. Like, there’s always, like, two-minute break in between rounds. Like, you don’t really have time to go rest at all. And I wasn’t, like, thinking through everything.”
Magnus Carlsen makes use of Tokyo Olympics instance
Carlsen additionally used the excessive leap occasion on the Tokyo Olympics as his reference, the place the gold medal was shared between Italian athlete Gianmarco Tamberi and Qatari Mutaz Barshim. Each athletes determined to not compete in a jump-off after reaching the identical top and as an alternative opted to share the gold medal.
“Of course, you know, it turned out, like, that people didn’t really, didn’t really take it the way that I thought they might, like what happened with the high jump at Olympics and everything. Which is, which is, which is, of course, fine,” he mentioned.
Revealing if he regretted his resolution, he added, “No, No, no, I’m, you know, I’m happy with the way things concluded. The only thing is I probably didn’t think through everything completely.”
The Blitz ultimate noticed Carlsen start with two wins, after which solely wanted a draw. His opponent staged a comeback to make it 2-2 in back-to-back video games. Each gamers out three successive attracts within the sudden demise, after which Carlsen proposed that the title could possibly be shared, which was agreed to by the Russian grandmaster.