Magnus Carlsen was once again handed defeat by R Praggnanandhaa in the first game of their duel for ranking places at the Las Vegas leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour on Saturday evening. Pragg, playing with white pieces, forced the five-time world champion Carlsen to resign in 43 moves. In the game played in Position No 414 in a 10-minute time control, Pragg seized an advantage on the board as per the evaluation bar as early as the 10th move and never yielded his edge from that stage. .
Position 414 sees a pair of knights on one side of the king while the bishop pair is on another side and the rooks standing as sentries on their regular squares on the edge of the board.
The result comes just three days after Praggnanandhaa beat the world no 1 from Norway in 39 moves. A subsequent defeat to Levon Aronian resulted in Carlsen being knocked out of the race for qualifying for the Winners’s Bracket.
Carlsen started his campaign at Las Vegas with a couple of wins. However, he then sank to losses against Praggnanandhaa and Wesley So. Then there were two draws, which left him needing a win in the final round just to force a tiebreak. He beat Bibisara Assaubayeva. But then lost both playoff games to Aronian, who clinched the final qualifying spot from the White Group.
“I think it started well (on Day 1). I felt all right, relatively rested at least compared to other days. And then I don’t know, I didn’t enjoy the whole process of just being pretty isolated there for many, many hours and not being able to talk to Peter (coach Peter Heine Nielsen) or Ella (wife Ella Malone) in between rounds and not being able to use my devices and so on. What happened then was just kind of a complete collapse of my nervous system,” Carlsen told the YouTube handle of Freestyle Chess after his win over Vidit. “I could have scraped through of course with some help but it would have been completely underserved. So, it was a complete collapse and yeah, sometimes you have one bad day and I’ve had that in Freestyle before in the preliminaries, but then there’s been a bit of a wider margin to get through. This time it wasn’t. It’s not an excuse. I should make it regardless.”
Incredibly, beating Carlsen is not new for the 19-year-old Indian GM. Praggnanandhaa had famously beaten Carlsen in the classical format at the Norway Chess tournament in 2023. Before that, he had defeated the Norwegian in an online game.
Carlsen later bounced back by thrashing Vidit Gujrathi 2-0 to advance to the next round while the Indian was eliminated from the event, finishing joint 13th with four others. The Norwegian said that he had suffered a “complete collapse of his nervous system” on the first day of the event and did not enjoy not being able to talk to his wife Ella or his long-time coach Peter Heine Nielsen between rounds.
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Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour is a series of multiple chess events around the year, modelled on the grand Slams in tennis started by Germany’s Jan Henric Buettner. In 2025, it was initially supposed to be held in cities like Weissenhaus, Paris, New York, New Delhi and Cape Town. But the New York event was shifted to Las Vegas while the India event was cancelled.
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