Nakamura-Carlsen and the Ultimate Blunder
If you must blunder, do so with confidence.
Another super-elite rapid-rapid (g/10’, no increment or delay) is underway on Chess.com, a double elimination tournament featuring many of the world’s best players including the perennial rivals Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura. They defeated all their opponents on their way to the winners’ final, playing a four-game match to be settled by an Armageddon game in case of a 2-2 tie.
The first two games were drawn fairly cleanly. Carlsen made a serious error in game 1, but found a brilliant defensive resource to minimize the damage and still hold the draw. In game 3 he played a terrific technical game, keeping Black a tempo away from escaping his bind to reach a drawish ending. Carlsen won to take a 2-1 lead, and then came the extraordinary fourth game.
The play was sharp and the evaluation went back and forth. After Nakamura’s 28th move he had an extra pawn and had achieved a complicated position (and thus good chances). Carlsen, however, thought he had found a brilliant tactical idea and sacrificed the exchange. When Carlsen played 32…Bg4 he demonstrated the main idea of his combination, and not only was he sold on it - at least when played 28…Rxg2 - Nakamura was sold on it too. After a few seconds of reconciling himself to his plight Nakamura resigned, giving Carlsen a 3-1 match victory and the right to wait for the winner of the losers’ bracket to produce a winner in a couple of days. (It’s very conceivable that Nakamura, who is already slotted into the final match of the losers’ bracket, will play a second and possibly third match with Carlsen to decide first and second places in the tournament.)
The only problem - it’s a big one - is that Nakamura was winning in the final position. This is what Tim Krabbé has dubbed “the ultimate blunder”; indeed, what could be worse than voluntarily losing a winning position. (He has collected 35 examples of this here; if he decides to update his site he now has a 36th case.) Rather than a drawn match and a chance to win in Armageddon, he lost. That said, he has a chance to earn another match with Carlsen, so not all is lost.
More about the tournament here, including a link to the live stream, and here are the Carlsen-Nakamura games with my notes.