World chess leader Magnus Carlsen won the World Rapid Championship in Samarkand

World chess leader Magnus Carlsen has added one more to his huge collection of prestigious trophies. At the World Rapid Chess Championship in Samarkand, the Norwegian defended his title of best, holding his traditional tournament. While playing, at first glance, without brilliance, he still proved that he had no equal in technique, in extracting an advantage from nothing and in implementing it. Russian Anastasia Bodnaruk unexpectedly won gold in the women’s championship.

Rapid chess, rapid chess, always means a high probability of all sorts of surprises, the rise of unknown grandmasters and the downfall of well-known ones. The list of celebrities who suffered such crashes at the championship in Samarkand was impressive. American Fabiano Caruana did not make it into the top ten after three days of competition, while the leader of domestic chess, Ian Nepomniachtchi, did not even make it into the top 30. And in general, at the top of the table there were many names that were not at all associated with favorite status. For example, fifth place went to Nepomniachtchi’s compatriot Volodar Murzin: 17 years old, he recently took silver at the “classical” junior world championship, but has minimal experience in fighting at the elite level, “seeding” in the late eighties.

However, the gold award went to the grandmaster, whom anyone who follows chess more or less closely should have considered an ironclad contender for it. Throughout 2023, Magnus Carlsen proved that, although he gave up the world title he had held for ten years, he remains the undisputed frontman of chess. But not thanks to the “classics”, in which he has been doing so-so lately, namely the game with tighter control. Here he is practically invulnerable.

Magnus Carlsen held the Samarkand tournament in his signature style. In fact, some may find him insipid, incongruous with his status.

Almost every game is a painful story with a minimum of bold, paradoxical decisions. But all this blandness is adjacent to the Norwegian’s never-fading ability to extract a tiny advantage from literally nothing and then implement it, without making any mistakes in the endgame, choosing exclusively the best – or at least the next-highest quality from the computer’s point of view – moves. And this phenomenal stability brought Magnus Carlsen 10 points out of a possible 13, allowing him to be half a point ahead of Vladimir Fedoseev, the former Russian grandmaster who has been representing Slovenia since 2023.

Russia, meanwhile, also won its chess gold on Thursday – in the women’s tournament. And this was already a full-fledged sensation. Anastasia Bodnaruk is not a young prodigy shot from an ambush, but a 31-year-old international master without particularly impressive achievements. But in Samarkand, the “seeded” 51st Bodnaruk jumped much higher than its own ceiling. She finished the championship, scoring equally – 8.5 points each – with Indian and Chinese chess players Humpy Koneru and Lei Tingjie. The Russian and Koneru fought for gold in a tiebreaker, finding themselves in this final of the finals due to better additional indicators, and Bodnaruk got the better of her opponent, who was generally rated an order of magnitude higher.

Alexey Dospehov