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Nakamura beats Carlsen in BNBank final

PeterDoggers
| 0 | Chess Event Coverage
Nakamura-Carlsen 3-1Hikarua Nakamura defeated Magnus Carlsen 3-1 in the final of the BNbank Blitz tournament, held Saturday, November 28th in Oslo, Norway. Carlsen won the first game and had good positions in games 2 and 4, but Nakamura had the strongest nerves.

The one-day blitz tourney sponsored by BNBank, a Norwegian retail and corporate bank, took place in Oslo Central Station on Saturday, November 28. Six blitz tournaments took place already on October 31st in Norway in the cities of Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Tromso, Trondheim and Porsgrunn. The winner from each city earned a spot in the final in Oslo, where ten invited world class players were also present, and the prize fund was 74,000 NOK (app. 8,700 Euros).

BNBank Blitz 2009The participants were GM Magnus Carlsen (2802, NOR), GM Hikaru Nakamura (2715, USA), GM Peter Heine Nielsen (2697, DEN), 4. GM Emanuel Berg (2594, SWE), 5. GM Jon Ludvig Hammer (2588, NOR), 6. GM Kjetil A. Lie (2547, NOR), 7. IM Viktorija Cmilyte (2480, LTU), 8. GM Monica Socko (2457) POL), 9. WIM Ellen Hagesæther (2269, NOR), 10. GM Leif Erlend Johannessen (2528, NOR), 11. Anders Hobber (2132, NOR, winner of the qualifier in Porsgrunn), 12. Daniel Kovachev (2243, NOR, winner of the qualifier in Oslo), 13. FM Kjetil Stokke (2382, NOR, winner of the qualifier in Bergen), 14. Pal Andreas Hansen (2072, NOR, winner of the qualifier in Trondheim), 15. FM Vadims Daskevics (2380, LAT, winner of the qualifier in Stavanger) and 16. Peter Flermoen (NOR, 2100, second place in the qualifier in Tromsø).

In the preliminary rounds the players were divided into 4 double round-robin groups. Two players from each group qualified for the quarter-finals. The time control was 3 minutes + 2 seconds increment per move. All results are nicely put together on this page of the tournament website.

Below are all available games for replay; unfortunately only the top 2 boards of each round were recorded. Below the viewer there are four videos of the final. Carlsen was dominating in the first two games, but his 62.Kf6?? in game 2 turned a won pawn endgame into a lost one. It had a devastating effect and eventually the reigning World Blitz champion had to acknowledge defeat after four games. The king of online blitz, Hikaru Nakamura, beat Magnus Carlsen 3-1.

Game viewer



Game viewer by ChessTempo


Here are the games of the final, posted on YouTube by Todd Freitag:

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PeterDoggers
Peter Doggers

Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”

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