Vincent Keymer once again showed his pedigree on Wednesday as he defeated World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen at the semi-finals of the Weissenhaus Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, in Wangels (Germany). The German, who was also one of D Gukesh’s second at the World Chess Championship in Singapore last year, earlier sealed a win against Carlsen in the first game of the semi-finals on Tuesday, and the result sent shockwaves.
Then he backed up his display with another sensational performance to draw the second game vs Carlsen, to enter the finals. Speaking after his win to Take Take Take application, Keymer said, “Mostly I’m relieved that I managed to see out this very tough game. And also it’s for me a personal incredible achievement to beat Magnus in a match.”
“I mean, basically, even if I was in a must-win situation, that position would have been quite nice. I mean, my position was, I think, clearly better. I was up on the clock around 20 minutes. So, yeah, to get myself into that much trouble after that is really not something I’m proud of. But, yeah, it happened.”
Part of Team D Gukesh
Keymer was one of Gukesh’s seconds at the recent World Championship, where the Indian GM beat Ding Liren to script history. The other members of Team Gukesh were Grzegorz Gajewski, Paddy Upton (mental conditioning coach), Radoslaw Wojtaszek, Pentala Harikrishnan, Jan Krzysztof Duda, Viswanathan Anand (mentor).
On being asked about how he handled the pressure of facing Carlsen in a crunch situation, he said, “Yeah, I was just trying to focus on the moves because at some moment you can’t really afford to think about all these things. Like if the game, even if something goes wrong after the game, you won’t have more than enough time to think about everything that you missed or could have played or could have done different. But in that moment, you just have to fully focused on playing the best possible moves because I don’t think there was a single moment when I felt that my position was hopeless.”
“Yes actually I think even though there was much more at stake than there usually is for me during games, it doesn’t really change that much it’s simply that it’s a game against Magnus and I am very low on time and the position is very complicated so that’s basically enough to be very nervous at least for me.”
