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World chess: Magnus Carlsen wins for the 5th time and retains his world title

2021-12-10T21:14:22.430Z


At the end of a confrontation that he mastered from start to finish against the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi, the Norwegian prodigy wins and scores a


It took him only eleven games out of the fourteen planned and eight hours of play to overcome his Russian challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi.

Norway's Magnus Carlsen retained the world chess title in Dubai on Friday.

Favorite before their clash, the world number 1 in the points classification since 2011 finally experienced the simplest World Championship of his career by winning 7.5 points to 3.5.

Congratulations to World Champion GM Magnus Carlsen!

🎊🎉



Magnus Carlsen has just won against Ian Nepomniachtchi to take the match score to 7.5 - 3.5.

Although Game 11 just ended, the format is best of 14 - so the Norwegian takes home his 5th @FIDE_chess World Championship title pic.twitter.com/4QVISaHOH1

- Lichess.org (@lichess) December 10, 2021

He thus won for the fifth time the title of world champion which he has held continuously since 2013 and two victories against the Indian Viswanathan Anand (2013, 2014), one against the Russian Sergey Karjakin (2016) and one against the American Fabiano Caruana (2018).

He who had won only one game in all in 2016 and 2018, each time forced to tiebreaks beyond the regulatory games, this time won four games against "Nepo", finishing undefeated.

"It's hard to feel a lot of joy when the situation is so comfortable, but I'm happy with my very good overall performance", explained the Norwegian at a press conference.

Haircut change

On the ropes after this lost marathon, Nepomniachtchi lost all composure from the sixth, offering on a plateau the next three wins over blunders, interspersed with two tasteless draws. “I would like to apologize for the way it went. These things (the blunders, Editor's note) that happened here have never happened in other competitions. I lost parts stupidly in my career, but not so much in such a short time ”, conceded the Russian in front of the press. Neither the arrival in Dubai of Sergey Karjakin, his main adviser who had faced Carlsen in 2016, to re-mobilize him, nor a change in his hairstyle allowed him to reverse the fate and hope to bring back the world title, absent from the country-king of the discipline since 2007.

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“He hasn't shown his best game, but it happens when you're in a difficult position,” Carlsen said of his opponent.

Mercilessly, the 31-year-old Norwegian did not fail to convert the offerings, whether playing white or black.

He therefore marks a little more in the history of his sport and is only one length away from the record for victories in the World Championship, held by the German Emanuel Lasker, which dates back to the beginning of the 20th century.

As a reminder, Russians Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov also have six World Championship victories, but some were obtained when two circuits coexisted, which was never the case for Magnus Carlsen.

Who to stand up to him now and prevent him from prolonging his reign on chess?

If the players of the Norwegian's generation have broken their teeth in front of him, the wait is now turning to the French prodigy Aliréza Firoujza.

The Iranian-born player was not yet a year old when Magnus Carlsen became grandmaster, but, at the height of his 18 years, he already seems the main obstacle, in the long term, to the domination of his elder.

World number 2 since December, Firoujza has qualified for the Candidates tournament which will bring together eight players to designate, during the year 2022, Magnus Carlsen's next challenger.

Source: leparis

All sports articles on 2021-12-10

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