Quote:
Originally Posted by Inyo
I am undeading this thread once again to supply additional information pertaining to chess doings.
We now have a new Chess World Cup Champion for 2023--a nearly month-long tournament that began on July 30 in Baku Azerbaijan with 206 participants: Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen (Norway), number 1 ranked player in the world and five time World Champion of Chess, though he has declined to play in future World Chess Championship matches unless time formats are changed; he has apparently grown "stressed and bored" with Classical Chess of late, preferring to participate with greater frequency in the faster rapid and blitz time controls.
Magnus Carlsen has now won every major chess tournament known to exist (except if you want to include Fischer Random, which is technically speaking not real chess, of course). In five previous appearances in the Chess World Cup, Magnus had most curiously indeed failed to gain the final; he did attain third place in 2017, though.
Here are Carlsen's two finals match games with 18 year-old Indian prodigy/phenom Grandmaster Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa that decided the 2023 Chess World Cup. Note of course that "Prag"--his chess nickname--as a top three tournament finisher, automatically qualifies for the next Candidates Tournament, which will ultimately determine who faces current World Chess Champion Ding Liren (China). Magnus has already stated for the record that he will not participate in the Candidates Tournament:
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Another update from the 2023 Chess World Cup.
In the women's finals, Aleksandra Goryachkina (Russia) won the title by defeating Nurgyul Salimova (Bulgaria) two games to zero in the classical chess format--but, a star was born during the tournament: 20 year-old International Master (one notch behind a Grandmaster in chess ratings hierarchy) Nurgyul Salimova lit up the women's competition with sensational, scintillating chess.
Indeed, she pulled off one of my top three favorite games of the entire tournament (men's and women's sections combined), a Morphy-like brilliancy featuring aesthetically satisfying sacrificial lines that forced resignation on the spot due to the unavoidable threat of a bishop-rook mate along the back rank. Awesome stuff. Inspiring.
And here it is--it's the second of the two games analyzed by Agamator Chess, below (both Salimova games here are exceptional): A true thing of beauty, indeed. Salimova is playing Grandmaster Anna Muzychuk ((Ukraine)--only the fourth woman in history to attain a FIDE chess rating of at least 2600, the former #2 women's chess player in the world who finished runner-up in the 2017 women's chess world championship match.