Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Wrong But Succesfull Attack
The Champions Chess Tour (CCT) 2025 was a competition featuring two online events: “Chessable Masters” and “Chess.com Classic”. Each event consisted of three sections: Qualifier, Play-In and Playoffs.
The Qualifier section was open to non-grandmaster titled players who competed in a nine-round Swiss. The top three players went to the Play-In section.
The Play-In section was open to GMs plus the three coming from the Qualifier. Players competed in a nine-round Swiss. The winner went straight to the Playoffs while players ranked 2nd to 15th played individual matches. Winners in each match moved to the Playoffs.
Players coming from the Play-In joined eight invited players in Playoffs and they contested in a double-elimination bracket. Contenders played for prize money and CCT points, which might grant them a spot in the Esports World Cup in summer 2025 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
All games used a rapid time control of 10-minute without increment.
The Playoffs of the Chess.com Classic was a four-day event on May 20-23. And the winners bracket saw an intriguing match between Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura.
In their particular match, they played four games. They drew the first two and the drama happened in the last two. Nakamura played the black pieces in game three and Carlsen’s surprised not only his opponent but also the live commentators with an unexpected exchange sacrifice. From there, Carlsen did what is his trademark (“squeezing water out of a stone”): making the most of a slight, nagging advantage.
What happened in the last game is something that almost never happens in professional chess, even at faster time controls: a GM resigning in a winning position!!
Nakamura resigned in the following position, seeing that he was going to lose his queen or his rook.
But he had the winning move 33.Rfg3!!
Carlsen started a wrong but apparently strong combination with a rook sacrifice that probably made a deep impression on Nakamura’s later resignation. Below is the start of Carlsen’s unfounded attack.
Without any doubt, under different circumstances, Nakamura would have found the winning move but in that game, he erroneously trusted in his opponent’s attack.
Carlsen later explained that he’d seen the winning move for White right after he sacrificed his rook and that “when he resigned, it was a bit absurd because at that point I was just desperately looking for ways that I could prolong the game.”
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