Chess: Magnus Carlsen triumphs at historic Champions Showdown in St Louis
The four-player $412.000 Champions Showdown in St Louis was a historic event, a quadrangular tournament of the super-elite who met each other six times in three days.Magnus Carlsen was the favourite, but after scoring 3.5/6 on the first day the Norwegian expressed dissatisfaction with his own performance: “I’m not feeling good at all.I scored about two points more than I should have, and I’m happy with that.
My level of play was extremely poor.”Day two, when he won four and lost two, was an improvement: “It was better than yesterday, but I would like to have more control in my games than I did today.I’ll take the result, of course.”On the final day, Carlsen defeated all three of his opponents, Gukesh Dommaraju with two wins and Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura by a win and a draw, and sounded much more positive: “There are still things here and there that I’m not super happy about, but there was more flow and I felt I was more on top of things, and not missing as many tricks.”The official result, using the Clutch system where wins on the second day counted two points and wins on the third day counted three, was Carlsen 25.
5/36, Caruana 16.5, Nakamura 14, Gukesh 10.This was used to divide up the $412,000 (£313,000) prize fund.The totals using the traditional scoring method of one for a win and a half for a draw were Carlsen 12.5, Caruana 8.
5, Nakamura 8, Gukesh 7.It appears that Carlsen made a special effort against Gukesh, perhaps to demonstrate what could have happened in the world championship match that never was (if Carlsen had taken up his place in the 2026 Candidates and qualified for a challenge to Gukesh’s crown).In game three between them, Carlsen gave an exquisite display of how to utilise the bishop pair and a space advantage in the endgame.In their sixth game, Carlsen’s black army dominated the entire board.The time limit for the Champions Showdown was 10 minutes per player per game, plus a five seconds per move increment.
That could be called Slow Blitz rather than Rapid and is in line with the general speeding up of time controls launched by Fide’s announcement of a Total Chess World Championship where classical games, which used to be two or two and a half hours per player, will become Fast Classical, just 45 minutes per player plus a 30 seconds increment.Objectively, the Champions Showdown games, particularly Carlsen’s, are of high quality and show that elite GMs can handle extreme complexities with very little time.After winning in St Louis, Carlsen flew back to Norway for a rare classical game for his Offerspill club in the Norwegian League.His opponent was IM Frode Elsness, rated 2418, and the game, starting 5pm GMT on Friday, can be followed live at lichess.orgAll four players could take positives from the event.
Carlsen proved he is still the No 1, despite the distractions of fatherhood.Caruana had a bad first day due to fatigue from his victory in the previous week’s US Championship, but recovered strongly in the later rounds.Nakamura proved that he is still among the world elite despite his unorthodox preparation of daily streaming plus a diet of games against low-rated opponents.Gukesh came to St Louis direct from a top board gold medal at the European Club Cup, and then departed immediately for the World Cup in Goa which starts on Saturday.He is recovering from his three defeats in a row in last month’s Fide Grand Swiss and has regained his place in the world top 10.
Quadrangulars are rare in top chess.The most famous was St Petersburg 1895-96, where the world champion Emanuel Lasker won and his US rival Harry Pillsbury contracted syphilis.Sign up to The RecapThe best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s actionafter newsletter promotionThere were also two South African quadrangulars in 1979 and 1981, staged in response to the country’s exclusion from international sport.In the first, Viktor Korchnoi won ahead of Wolfgang Unzicker, Tony Miles and Anatoly Lein.A Guardian reader who was then a wallboard operator notes that the demo operator also had the job of replenishing Miles’s jug of milk, requiring up to eight pints during a single game.
Garry Kasparov has joined the debate about Vladimir Kramnik, using sharp words in an interview in Russian to describe the player to whom he lost the world crown a quarter of a century ago.“Danya [Daniel Naroditsky] was one of the most transparent players online – he streamed, he explained every move, he played blitz at 3000+ for years.To accuse him on the basis of some statistical model that even its creator says is preliminary? That’s not serious chess analysis, that’s character assassination.Kramnik didn’t just question moves, he questioned integrity without evidence.And when Danya responded calmly, with data, Kramnik doubled down.
That’s not how a world champion behaves,That’s how a bitter man behaves,”Meanwhile, the petition asking Fide to ban Kramnik and strip him of his grandmaster title is approaching 50,000 signatures,For his part, Kramnik has defended his actions in an interview with Al Arabia, while Russian media has broadly supported him,Scotland’s GM Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant has won the gold medal in the Women’s World Over-50 Championship at Gallipoli, Italy, with a round to spare.
The Edinburgh 57-year-old scored an unbeaten 8/10, and the only player who could catch her, Sweden’s Pia Cramling, drew her 10th round game to drop 1.5 points behind.Arakhamia-Grant was one of the leading players in her native Georgia before she married the Scotland international Jonathan Grant and moved to Edinburgh.She already has a stellar chess career including wins over former world champion Vasily Smyslov and Nakamura, and she was runner-up in the open British Championship in 2006.IM Sohum Lohia, 16, England’s No 2 junior after GM Shreyas Royal, scored one of the best successes of his career so far on Friday when he shared first prize at the English Chess Federation’s Coventry International Open.
Lohia, China’s IM Wang Hao, and the Czech Republic’s top seeded Vojtech Plat all totalled 7 out of 9,Their tie was not broken, and each received £1,000,English GMs Danny Gormally and Mark Hebden tied for fourth with Ukraine’s GM Alexander Kovchan on 6,5,77 players competed.
3996: 1 Bf6! Bxf6 2 Qxf4! Bg5 (to stop 3 Qh6 mate) 3 Rxg5 Qd8 4 Rg8+! Resigns due to 4…Rxg8 5 Qh6 mate.
UK launches search for ‘town of culture’ among places ‘written out of national story’
Too many places have been “written out of the national story”, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said as she launched a search for the UK’s first “town of culture”.The town of culture designation comes after the success of the cities of culture programme, which has put Derry, Hull, Coventry and, this year, Bradford in the limelight for a year, boosting the local economy, tourism, civic pride and access to the arts, according to its supporters.The government said the first winning town would get £3.5m to help it develop a cultural programme in the summer of 2028.The competition for the 2029 UK city of culture has also opened, with the winner being promised £10m, the first time the government has put an upfront figure on its contribution
Lettings agency takes blame in Rachel Reeves licence row
Keir Starmer appears to have escaped the huge political damage of potentially losing his chancellor weeks before the budget, after 24 hours of intense scrutiny over whether Rachel Reeves broke the law when she rented out her family home.The Conservatives said Reeves must be sacked if she committed an offence by not obtaining a council licence before letting out her four-bedroom house in south London when the family moved into 11 Downing Street. No 10 was initially unable to explain why Starmer believed an apology from the chancellor was sufficient.But after a chaotic day, the lettings agency employed by Reeves said it was to blame for not applying for the licence, and apologised for the error.Emails subsequently released by Downing Street between the agency and Reeves’s husband, Nicholas Joicey, a senior civil servant, supported this version of events
Starmer feels the effects of setting high standards for his party in opposition
There is a theory in British politics, often attributed to Tony Blair, that you need to be careful about throwing a boomerang in opposition, because when you make it to power it could come back and hit you in the face.As opposition leader, Keir Starmer became adept at landing blows on the Conservatives. Over the Partygate scandal in particular, he called for Boris Johnson to quit over his rule-breaking. “You cannot be a lawmaker and a lawbreaker and it’s time to pack his bags,” he said.After Durham police launched an investigation into whether he had broken lockdown rules himself over having a beer and curry at a campaign event, he took a huge political gamble and said he would quit if he was found guilty
Reeves says she should have checked rental licence had been obtained as letting agent apologises – as it happened
Downing Street has now released the new material.Here is the letter from Rachel Reeves to the PM explaining what happened.She says the letting agency had told the family that they would sort out the licence, and failed to do so. But she accepts that it should have been her responsibility to check that this had happened.The lettings agency that rented out Rachel Reeves’s family home has taken responsibility for the failure to apply for a council licence and apologised for the error, quashing speculation about the chancellor’s position
What has Rachel Reeves done wrong – and how serious are things for her?
Less than a month before she is due to deliver the budget, Rachel Reeves has admitted breaking rules by failing to apply for a licence from her local council before letting out her south London home.Keir Starmer accepted an apology from Reeves, who said she had not known a licence was required, and declared the matter closed.However, there was a further development on Thursday when Reeves found emails showing that the letting agent for the property had told her husband that a licence would be necessary. The property manager offered to submit the application for them and then failed to do so – having resigned before the tenancy started.Reeves told the prime minister she took “full responsibility” for the failure to obtain a licence and that she was sorry for not finding the information sooner
How one bad oyster did for the Liberal party | Letter
The article on oysters (The £1 oyster: cut-price shellfish is all the rage – but is eating it advisable?, 27 October) brought to mind the significant role that a single oyster played historically in the decline of the Liberal party.In December 1914, Percy Illingworth, the universally respected Liberal chief whip, ate what turned out to be a bad oyster and died soon after from typhoid, aged only 45.Thereafter, Herbert Asquith had immense difficulty in finding an effective and trusted chief whip, finally ending up, in the hung parliament following the 1923 general election, with Vivian Phillipps, whose fatal flaw was that his personal loyalty to Asquith was coupled to a deep dislike of David Lloyd George.As the problematic parliamentary arithmetic of the first Labour govenment played out over the months of 1924, the split between Asquith and Lloyd George deepened, and Phillipps was unable to exercise the crucial unifying chief whip role, with disastrous results for the Liberal party thereafter.Thus a single oyster changed British political history
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