Norway’s world No 1 beat the world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, 5.5-0.5, and also edged the world Nos 2 and 3
The four-player 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.”
