Picture Credit: Twitter
Indian teenager Donnarumma Gukesh created history to become the youngest player to defeat World Number one Magnus Carlsen at the Aimchess Rapid Online Tournament. Gukesh registered the victory with white pieces in the 9th round. This also was Carlsen’s second defeat in two days as he lost in the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour against 19-year-old Indian Arjun Erigaisi.
Gukesh was 16 years 4 months 20 days old when he defeated Carlsen and broke the record of Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa who took down the Norwegian in 39 moves at the Airthings Masters, in February 2022. He was 16 years 6 months and 10 days old at the time of his historic win.
Gukesh took the upper hand against Carlsen when he played 25.Rc7 position which seemed favourable for Carlsen. The Norwegian’s reply was 25.Re8 which turned out catastrophic for World Number One. After Gukesh’s 26.Qb6 Carlsen’s queen was put in danger. Carlsen took five minutes to analyse the situation which resulted in anger and pushed him to resign from the game.
Despite the win, Gukesh wasn’t impressed with his own play but wasn’t extremely happy about his performance. “Obviously, beating Magnus is always special but I was not really very proud of that game,” he said.
Similarly, Carlsen agreed with Gukesh’s sentiment of the victory not being extremely impressive. He also talked about how he has suffered defeats against Indian teenagers and was impressed that the 16-year-old’s performance.
He said, “Pragg is the only one I’ve lost multiple times to. As for Arjun and Gukesh: Arjun I’ve generally beaten; Gukesh very similar. I think Gukesh has been extremely impressive in classical chess recently. Perhaps this rapid win wasn’t his proudest effort, even though getting a win is always nice.”
Going back to Carlsen's recent games, he suffered a shocking defeat against Arjun Erigais in round seven of the preliminaries of the Aimchess Rapid online chess tournament. The win over Carlsen was Erigais’ third straight win as he previously defeated Nils Grandelius (Sweden), and Daniel Naroditsky (USA). He then settled for a draw against Jan-Krzyszstof Duda (Poland).
