Lately the chess world has become a playground for controversies, and fans have been treated to one incident after another in quick succession. The latest is the ongoing feud going on between FIDE and Freestyle Chess, and it has reached epic proportions.
Fans also haven’t still forgotten Magnus Carlsen’s controversies at 2024’s year-ending Rapid and Blitz Championship. The Norwegian was first involved in a jeans scandal during the Rapid Championship, which saw him pull out of the tournament. Meanwhile, he reached the final of the Blitz Championship, and controversy hit once again as he shared the title with Russian GM Ian Nepomniachtchi. But what angered fans was that Carlsen was caught on camera urging his opponent to play short draws if the FIDE failed to accept their demand of sharing the title. The incident also sent social media into a state of meltdown, with many fans accusing the pair of fixing the result. Many fans, current GMs also pointed out examples in other sports, where a winner is always decided and the title is never shared.
Speaking on the Take Take Take application, Carlsen recently gave more clarity into the reasons behind his actions at the Blitz final. The World No. 1 was asked if the decision to share the title was due to his lack of drive, he replied, “I mean, it’s not a disrespectful question at all. I mean, I’m very open about the fact that I don’t have quite the same drive as I did earlier. It did creep in at some point that I felt like after the comeback he made that he would have been very hard done by if he didn’t get his first world championship title because of this. Apart from that, you know, I was, of course, earlier thinking that I was going to win the match. I won the first two games, and I was feeling quite good, and he made a very good comeback. At that point, of course, my confidence was shaken a bit. We played three really high-quality draws in the tiebreak as well.”
“So I wasn’t feeling confident that I was gonna win so it was a combination of that like feeling that it would be a nice solution partly also you know wanting to get out of there with the world championship title and I honestly thought that it would be a nice moment and I still think that that it was. Also, I think people got to realize that at that point, like, you know, you’re not always thinking very clearly. Like, there’s always, like, two-minute break in between rounds. Like, you don’t really have time to go rest at all. And I wasn’t, like, thinking through everything.”
Magnus Carlsen uses Tokyo Olympics example
Carlsen also used the high jump event at the Tokyo Olympics as his reference, where the gold medal was shared between Italian athlete Gianmarco Tamberi and Qatari Mutaz Barshim. Both athletes decided to not compete in a jump-off after reaching the same height and instead opted to share the gold medal.
“Of course, you know, it turned out, like, that people didn’t really, didn’t really take it the way that I thought they might, like what happened with the high jump at Olympics and everything. Which is, which is, which is, of course, fine,” he said.
Revealing if he regretted his decision, he added, “No, No, no, I’m, you know, I’m happy with the way things concluded. The only thing is I probably didn’t think through everything completely.”
The Blitz final saw Carlsen begin with two wins, and then only needed a draw. His opponent staged a comeback to make it 2-2 in back-to-back games. Both players out three successive draws in the sudden death, and then Carlsen proposed that the title could be shared, which was agreed to by the Russian grandmaster.
