“Winning by half a point after a lot of results go my way doesn’t feel like a statement,” was how Magnus Carlsen summed up the Stavanger tournament, where he finished just half a point ahead of Fabiano Caruana. The centrepiece of the event was his second game with India’s world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, in which Carlsen banged the table in frustrated rage when his winning position slipped away.
Carlsen said that “the Armageddon games were atrocious” but pointed out that he had scored plus two in classical and claimed that he had played the best chess. He did, with the glaring exception of round six and the table fist-pump.
