Norway Chess, Rounds 1-6

Carlsen leads, Ding in free fall.

Sadly, the biggest story of the Norway Chess tournament has been the staggeringly terrible play of Ding Liren. Since winning the World Championship in early 2023, he was sick and absent from the game for almost the rest of that year, and now in 2024 his play has been abysmal. It’s not just a matter of being off-form; he looks like he doesn’t want to be at the board at all, and his play doesn’t look like a world champion on a bad day, but like a much weaker player who plays without much gumption. Hopefully he can turn things around quickly; if not, I hope he’ll abdicate the title so there can be a title match between Dommaraju Gukesh (who will get a match in any case) and Candidates runner-up (on tiebreak) Hikaru Nakamura (who has overtaken Fabiano Caruana to regain the #2 spot on the rating list). We’ll see.

The tournament, Ding’s suffering aside, has been very exciting. It’s a double round-robin with an interesting scoring system. The players face off in a classical game, and if someone wins that game they get three points, the loser getting nothing. If it’s a draw, each player gets a point and then they play an Armageddon game with the same colors. White gets 10 minutes, Black gets 7 minutes and draw odds, and the winner of the game (or Black in case of a draw) gets an extra half a point added to his score.

In the first two rounds all the classical games were drawn, but the relative peace was obliterated after that. In round 3 Magnus Carlsen and Ding Liren lost to Praggnanandhaa R. and Caruana, respectively, and then in rounds 4 and 5 all the games were decisive. In round 6 there was only one decisive game (Ding blundering into a very, very obvious mate in two with plenty of time on the clock in a tense but objectively equal position to lose his fourth game in a row), but the other games had their interesting moments as well.

The scores, with four rounds to go, look like this:

1. Carlsen 12

2. Nakamura 11

3. Praggnanandhaa 9.5

4. Firouzja 8

5. Caruana 6.5

6. Ding 2.5

The games, with my comments to all the classical games but none of the Armageddon games, are here.

There’s a concurrent women’s event of comparable (relative) strength. That field includes the current women’s World Champion, Ju Wenjun, four of the recent Candidates (including the three who tied for second), and the 61-year-old legend Pia Cramling (one of the first women to achieve the full GM title and the top-rated woman back in 1984). Ju and Anna Muzychuk are currently tied for first with 10.5 points apiece, half a point ahead of Vaishali R.