Baku burner

If you love chess enough to play hundreds of tournaments you will, sooner or later, play like a numbskull. You lick your wounds, go to bed, and hope the engine belches into action the next day.

As a wise man once told me, the great comfort of a knockout tournament is that if you play badly, at least you get to go home. Except that doesn’t apply to Magnus Carlsen, or at least not yet. The world no. 1 is the top seed at the Fide World Cup, currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan. But he suffered two serious glitches on consecutive days in his fourth round match against Germany’s Vincent Keymer, one of the world’s top juniors.

Vincent Keymer-Magnus Carlsen

Fide World Cup, Baku 2023

Keymer held a modest edge in the first game, until Carlsen blundered, playing 36…Nd5-c7 to reach the position in the diagram. Keymer pounced with 37 Nd6, attacking the pawn on b7.