THE FINAL POSITION

The whole match boils down to this position — 10 years from now this is the sacrifice we will all remember when we talk about Carlsen vs Karjakin. If Black takes the queen with his pawn then Rxf7 is mate. If he takes with the king then Rh8 checkmate.

I was online watching the game in real time and the online audience exploded in cheers of “ow!” and “Incredible!” And yes, I was one of them.

Magnus Carlsen remains the world champion and his next defense will be in November 2018.

This match was a good fight. It started with seven straight draws and then Karjakin rather fortuitously won game 8. After the draw in game 9 that meant there were only 3 games left to play and the title was his to lose. Carlsen was up to the task though and won game 10 to tie the match but not after Karjakin missed a forced draw. The final 2 games were drawn rather uneventfully to send the match into tie-breaks.

After the world championship was over Karjakin admitted that missing the draw in game 10 was the critical moment for him. However, “I don’t want to say that Magnus was lucky, because he was basically winning in games 3 and 4, so it could turn in different ways. It happened as it should have happened. I will try to improve my play.”

What about the future? Remember that Carlsen has proposed that the world championship match be replaced with the Knock-out (KO) System with a starting field of 128 players. The players will play mini- matches against each other and the one left standing at the end is declared world champion.

This was the system that FIDE used in 1998 and it was scrapped in 2005. I can talk/ write for days about this but overall the system was very popular for most players ( gave everybody a chance to earn decent money) but among the elite they hated it because short matches left too much to chance — the stronger player could blunder a game and immediately be knocked out. Indeed many world championship and candidates winners had early losses and recovered later. Please do not get the impression that I don’t like the KO system — it is actually the one I prefer but I have to recognize that the top players are almost unanimous against it, except for Magnus.

Carlsen: “But it seems that for now the chess world doesn’t agree with me on that. They want to have the system that we have, so for now that’s what I’m dealing with. Again, for improvements, I’m open to anything as long as it doesn’t impair our ability to play in the best way possible.”

Anyway, all of that is still in the future. For now, let Magnus Carlsen rest on his laurels for a while and listen to proclamations of KING CARLSEN.

We will give you games 2 and 3 of the rapid tie breaks on Thursday. Both of them, including the miracle draw in game 2, are well worth playing over.