Carlsen beats American challenger to keep world chess title
After three weeks, 12 straight draws and a day of tiebreakers, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen finally retained the world chess championship in London on Wednesday with a victory against Fabiano Caruana, his American challenger.
Carlsen’s victory came in what amounted to sudden-death chess: a scheduled series of four socalled rapid games in which the players had a total of 25 minutes to make their moves. The speedier pace of the games, after the far more deliberate matchups of the previous three weeks, meant players were more likely to make blunders. And that increased the chance of a victory by one player.
Carlsen won the first two games, then closed out Caruana in Game 3.
Caruana, 26, was bidding to become the first American world champion since Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky to win the world title in 1972. The famously cantankerous Fischer forfeited his title in 1975 amid a dispute with the world chess federation, and the sport has been dominated by Russians and Eastern Europeans in the decades since then.
The tiebreaker result was not a shock. While Carlsen, 27, and Caruana, 26, are closely matched in longer conventional chess games, known as classical chess, Carlsen had been considered the favorite in the tiebreaker because he has had better rapid chess results than Caruana.
The tiebreaker was a decisive end to a match that promised excitement when it began Nov. 9 but instead fizzled amid an interminable run of draws. Carlsen and Caruana are the two best players in the world, and an eager crowd watched them play from behind one-way glass in London.