Magnus Carlsen Wins Titled Tuesday By Full Point

It's always a wonderful surprise at Chess.com (and for all chess fans) when the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, gets the itch for online blitz. Yesterday, Titled Tuesday provided the perfect outlet. Also competing with the world champion? Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Dmitry Andreikin, Egypt's first 2700, Bassem Amin, Rameshbabu Praggnandandhaa, and nearly 200 more hungry titled players!

Unfortunately, the enthusiasm pushed our live chess servers to record capacity's, stressing the system and causing a partial outage in our live chess service (but not a server crash) between 13:00 and 13:12. The servers restored automatically. Not all players were affected, but the decision was made to restart the tournament. Fortunately, few competitors were deterred, and the tournament was again underway. We sincerely apologize for the delay to all players and fans.

In Magnus Carlsen's last Titled Tuesday, he smoked the field, scoring 9.5/10 and winning by 1.5 points. Today, he was only slightly mellower. Indeed the world champion has shown that when he is in form (as in the Leuven blitz tournament), he is an order of Magnustude better than other super-GMs in blitz chess. Here is one of Carlsen's funner wins.

While Carlsen was playing this kind of relentless and patient chess, some competitors were starting to slip. Vachier-Lagrave withdrew immediately after ceding a draw in round one. Nakamura also lost in round two, but he decided to soldier on.

Nakamura was using quite a tactical approach to get his wins. Here are two nice combinations he employed.

Unfortunately, Nakamura withdrew after round eight when he lost to IM Tobi-Wan-Kenobi whose account was closed in the 10th round. Carlsen had beaten this player with positional play in the prior round.

The story of the tournament emerged in round nine when Kevin Bordi (AKA BlitzStream) got the opportunity to play Carlsen. Bordi was performing, starting with 4/4, and he decided to open with the Grob against Carlsen.

This offbeat opening proved surprisingly effective as he got an excellent middlegame before the game turned chaotic. With the result very much up for grabs, both players missed wins before Carlsen eventually forced the draw as he could not otherwise stop mate. Enough talk though. Whether or not you speak French, you should experience the game from Bordi's perspective!

With a win in the final round, Carlsen quickly pulled away, leaving the remaining players to contest second in his wake. GMs Federico Perez Ponsa, Yuri Solodovnichenko, Salem Saleh, and IM Minh Le pulled ahead of the rest of the field, completing strong tournament performances with 8/10.

Final Standings | MasterClass Titled Tuesday Blitz, November 2017

Find the full Titled Tuesday results and crosstable here.

Commentary on the complete event was provided by the 2/3 beard, 1/3 man hybrid IM Aman Hambleton.

If he doesn't get that final GM norm soon, the beard may take over the man! Recent activities are not helping.

Find the full stream on twitch.tv/chess and chess.com/tv.

Watch live video from Chess on www.twitch.tv

Carlsen earned $500 for his clear first place, but it wasn't a bad Tuesday night payday for our second-place finishers as GMs Perez Ponsa, Solodovnichenko, Saleh, and IM Le each earned $225 for shared second place. GM Krikor Mekhitarian won the $100 streamer's prize for the second month in a row