There was a hilarious blunder on day 4 of the Las Vegas leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour as Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura spent almost five minutes before their games against Arjun Erigaisi and Fabiano Caruana respectively analysing the wrong opening position. Both Carlsen and Nakamura only realised their mistake when they actually arrived on their board for their game and then saw the pieces lined up in position no 122. In the position that Carlsen and Nakamura had analysed, they had exchanged the starting position of their queen with a knight: instead of the knight being on the a file and the queen being on b, Carlsen and Nakamura were analysing a starting position where the queen was in the corner and the knight was on b file.
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ChessBase India caught Hikaru looking at the position on the screen just before the start of his game and asking Carlsen, “Did we look at the wrong position?” Carlsen, too, looked surprised at this. Then, he let out a short laugh as he looked at the board itself.
Remarkably, despite the hilarious error, Magnus beat Arjun in that game while Nakamura drew with Caruana. Both Nakamura and Carlsen were playing with white pieces. Carlsen and Nakamura will be fighting for third place today while Arjun and Caruana will battle for fifth place. Praggnanandhaa will take on Wesley So for seventh spot.
In scenes captured before the match, Arjun and Caruana had opted to analyse the game for the full 10 minutes. Cameras caught both of them sitting on the communal table and sitting on their knees to evaluate what their best response should be. Nakamura meanwhile opted to analyse the position by himself on one of the playing boards. Then, Carlsen walked up to him and joined him to analyse the game. Carlsen, with his white jacket worn only on one shoulder, did plenty of analysing.
“Wait a second, breaking news! Magnus and Hikaru are teaming up. For the first time in this event,” said grandmaster Peter Leko on the Freestyle Chess’ Pro Stream.
WATCH: Magnus and Hikaru analyse wrong position
As the camera focussed on the analysis of the world no 1 and no 2, in the pro commentary stream, grandmasters like Leko, Judit Polgar and Vincent Keymer sounded confused by the moves the players seemed to be making.
When Carlsen played 1.c4 as his opening move against Arjun, that caused even more surprise, as Leko said: “Wait a second, after analysing d4 for so long, he’s played c4. Is he fooling everyone?”
Soon enough, Nakamura too played 1.c4.
