Carlsen Scores 3/3 In Norwegian Team Championship, Climbs To 2837

World number-one Magnus Carlsen scored 3/3 for Offerspill on the final weekend of the Norwegian Team Chess Championship. His wins over GM Simen Agdestein and IMs Kristian Stuvik Holm and Alparslan Isik saw him gain 4.1 rating points to climb to 2837.1, 35 points clear of GM Hikaru Nakamura and 50 points ahead of World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju. They also helped Offerspill beat the two teams ahead of them, but Valerenga clinched the title while OSS took second place.

The nine-round 2024-5 Norwegian Team Chess Championship (Eliteserien) was a 10-team round-robin held over three weekends in October, February, and now March 7-9 in Baerum, near Oslo.

Valerenga, whose star performers included GMs Kaido Kulaots (5/6) and Borki Predojevic (3/3), took the title, while OSS, with GM Jon Ludvig Hammer (2.5/3) and FM Sondre Melaa (5.5/6), took silver. Carlsen's Offerspill had to settle for third.    

2024/5 Norwegian Team Chess Championship Final Standings 

Playing the Norwegian Team Championship is dangerous for Carlsen, who this year was rated well over 200 points higher than the next highest-rated player (Hammer), but he's now scored 10/11, conceding just two draws, since the 2019/20 season. His performance on the final weekend couldn't have gone better.

Up first was 57-year-old Agdestein, Carlsen's first main coach and a player famous for combining a career in chess with professional soccer. Agdestein won their first classical game in the 2004 Norwegian Championship, defeated Carlsen in a playoff to win the 2005 Championship, but then lost the playoff of the same event to a 15-year-old Carlsen in 2006. Agdestein has by now racked up nine Norwegian titles to Carlsen's one, but the youngster moved on to winning world titles.

Their game in the Norwegian League was seen by Nakamura as an example of how a much higher-rated player goes about getting the win required not to lose rating points. He described the clash as:

A little bit of a window into how top players calculate or how they approach games against players who are lower-rated, where you’re really looking for the imbalance, you need something that is off-center and it’s not very symmetrical and you don’t have the same pieces on the board.

Carlsen's first classical game since playing the Chess Bundesliga for St. Pauli in January went very smoothly.

Together with a win for GM Frode Urkedal that was enough to give Offerspill a 3.5-2.5 victory over eventual silver-medalists OSS, while in the penultimate round they took down the future champions.

Holm was a rock for Valerenga with seven draws and one win, but he also fell to the world number-one, with a positional squeeze suddenly decided by trapping a rook.

The final game saw a closely-fought strategic battle against SK1911's Isik, who had taken down Agdestein, until what Nakamura called the "severe error" 30...g5?!. Why was he so critical of a move that the computer only gave as an inaccuracy? First he jokingly referred to GM Levon Aronian. 

This is a mistake for a couple of reasons. First of all, the famous Armenian chess player and philosopher Levon Aronian once said pawns don’t move backward, but additionally you now create weaknesses on the a1-h8 diagonal as well. 

Then Nakamura referred back to his coaching sessions with 13th World Champion Garry Kasparov back in 2011. Kasparov had told him, "Magnus loves it when his king is very safe and his opponents start pushing pawns and creating weaknesses. He really does feel comfortable when that happens."

Magnus loves it when his king is very safe and his opponents start pushing pawns and creating weaknesses.

—Hikaru Nakamura quotes advice given to him by Garry Kasparov

Carlsen went on to score a smooth win in a queen endgame.

That win meant that Carlsen had gained 4.1 rating points for the weekend, climbing to 2837.1.

Carlsen is approaching 14 years unbroken as the world number-one on the live rating list and his reign looks unlikely to end anytime soon. He's now 35.1 points ahead of Nakamura, and 50.1 points ahead of Gukesh. 

While Carlsen's focus has switched away from classical chess, we may see him in action in the Chess Bundesliga on March 22, when St. Pauli host Baden-Baden (headed by GMs Fabiano Caruana and Alireza Firouzja) in Hamburg. Then he won't be playing regular chess, but will play long "classical" time controls in the Paris Freestyle Chess Grand Slam (April 7-14) and the Grenke Freestyle Chess Open (April 17-21).

We're guaranteed to see Carlsen back playing regular classical chess on May 26-June 6, when he takes on GMs Nakamura, Caruana, Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi, and Wei Yi in Norway Chess 2025, though with the twist that drawn games will lead to an armageddon decider.