Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship
nytimes.com

First, hats off to both players for a hard fought match. To Magnus for successfully defending his title, and to Fabiano for pushing Magnus right to the brink. This was an exciting matchup that was good for chess, especially American chess thanks to Fabi.

I give Magnus enormous respect for his classy remark in the closing ceremony, when he stated that Fabiano has as much right to claim the throne of classical chess as he does. This is 100% true given their drawn match, be didn’t have to say it, but the fact that he offered that recognition to Fabiano is such a gentleman’s move. It’s enough to make me forget the disappointment I felt due to his draw offer in game 12. Magnus not only is the champ, he deserves to be the champ.

Fabiano talked about taking lessons from this experience. I hope his big takeaway is to begin incorporating online blitz and bullet into his training routine. From playing bughouse with him, I know that he is very unsure of himself when it comes to these faster time controls. I don’t blame him for this. Most likely it is a result of his coach(es) instructing him not to “waste his time” or “ruin his chess” with blitz and bullet.

The truth is, blitz chess is not only insanely fun but extremely good training to develop intuition for slow chess. In case anyone has doubts about whether it is valuable, we just saw a world championship title awarded based on rapid.

tl;dr: Play more bullet and blitz! It’s good for you.

* Shameless plug: I have been developing an online interface to help people become insanely good at bullet and blitz in a short amount of time. Essentially I reverse engineered the process of how I became a chess prodigy and prototyped a web interface to do it faster and at scale. I currently have an almost-MVP integrated with LiChess API and I’m looking for both beta testers and full stack devs (web and mobile) to help me launch this thing. With a little luck we will have Fabi, Magnus, Hikaru and others testing this in a month or two. I could really use some help on the dev side so anyone interested, please leave a comment! Can offer some combination of equity/cash/world-class private chess instruction to the right person or people :-)

As someone who enjoys blitz much more than classical chess and would like to get better at it, your interface sounds interesting. I'm only ~1,800 in blitz on Lichess, but I'd be curious to beta test it or take lessons.