Carlsen Claims No. 1 Blitz Spot On Chess.com
As of Monday, GM Magnus Carlsen is the new number-one blitz player on Chess.com. The world champion played a 57(!)-game match with GM Vladimir Fedoseev and stopped at a rating of 3204, four points more than GM Hikaru Nakamura currently has.
After the announcement that Chess.com has offered to buy the Play Magnus group of companies, many hope to see Carlsen competing more on Chess.com. On Monday evening, that was already the case.
The 31-year-old Carlsen played no fewer than 57 games, incidentally against just one player, the 27-year-old Russian Fedoseev. At the end of the session, Carlsen had won 37 games, drawn seven, and lost 13, scoring 40.5/57 or 71%. More importantly, he earned 37 rating points, jumping from 3167 to 3204. It was obvious that the goal was to surpass Nakamura and reach first place.
The following was quite a nice game:
In fact, Carlsen and Fedoseev have battled before in an effort by Carlsen to top the Chess.com rating lists. At that time, Carlsen came quite close to the summit on a pseudo-anonymous account, but Fedoseev put up a fight and prevented Carlsen from reaching the peak. One of the most memorable moments there occurred in this clip where Carlsen was on the verge of winning, but Fedoseev pulled off a hilarious swindle that even had Carlsen laughing.
Carlsen's jump in the blitz ratings on Chess.com soon got an appropriate answer from Nakamura himself, albeit in over-the-board chess. The American grandmaster scored a fabulous 7.5/9 on the first of two days of blitz in St. Louis, earning almost 40 rating points for the FIDE blitz rating list. It was another top GM who made note of it on Twitter.
A fellow chessdotcom boy crushing that 2900 barrier, what more could one wish for?♟️📈🔥 pic.twitter.com/vS8RYvwwEN
— Anish Giri (@anishgiri) August 30, 2022
With both Carlsen and Nakamura in "blitz beast mode," the start of a new rivalry here on Chess.com between the two legends of the game is a tantalizing thought.
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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