GM Magnus Carlsen won the online Aimchess U.S. Rapid tournament on Sunday, securing a $30,000 paycheck. The world champion called it a “fairly smooth ride” as he also won the final’s second match against GM Vladislav Artemiev, scoring 2.5-0.5.

“It feels great,” said Carlsen after winning his third leg in the Champions Chess Tour after convincingly beating Artemiev 2-0. “It’s the first time in, like, ever that I won one of these tournaments and it’s been a fairly smooth ride so that feels really good.”

Carlsen again started with a win right away, this time with the black pieces. The middlegame, from a Queen’s Gambit Exchange, was fairly quiet and had the interesting twist that Carlsen walked up his a-pawn to a6. Watching along, his second GM Peter Heine Nielsen noted the similarity with the more common running of the h-pawn to h6 as he tweeted:

“The human brain is strange. I have gotten used to a pawn on h6 gives you a great long-term attack, but the a6-pawn intuitively still just looks weak to me.”

That a-pawn did eventually decide the game, so it was clearly the main theme. GM Alex Yermolinsky will soon provide further explanation:

The second game was a small exception to the “smooth ride,” as there was a tiny glitch in the Norwegian’s play. As he pointed out himself, he played the wrong rook to d8:

“I was pretty sure I was going to lose the second game, to be honest,” Carlsen said. “I had completely missed his idea of going a5 and giving up the pawn. I brought the wrong rook to attack his pawn.”

Carlsen decided to “bite the bullet” and take a pawn. “Realistically I don’t think I should have held there in practice.” But he did, mostly because Artemiev once again got into time trouble.

In a must-win situation now, Artemiev had to take more risks as Black and went for a Najdorf and then choosing a Dragon setup against 6.Be2. Despite only needing a draw, Carlsen then went for the most principled setup which was one with long castling.

Artemiev said he missed his opponent’s 18.Bd4 idea, followed by 19…a3 20.b3, and felt he was lost after that. He could live with the result in the final, saying: “It’s logical because Magnus played good and I think that I didn’t have chances in these matches.”

We’ll be seeing Carlsen again in just two days, and over-the-board, as the Norway Chess tournament starts on Tuesday. There he will be playing the last two classical games with GM Ian Nepomniachtchi before their world championship match.

Carlsen, on whether he’s anxious to face Nepo: “I’m not sure if I’m anxious, I haven’t thought about that but I’m excited to play a big tournament, that’s for sure.”

The Aimchess U.S. Rapid ran August 28-September 5, 2021 on chess24. The preliminary phase was a 16-player rapid (15|10) round-robin. The top eight players advanced to a six-day knockout that consisted of two days of four-game rapid matches, which advance to blitz (5|3) and armageddon (White has five minutes, Black four with no increment) tiebreaks only if a knockout match is tied after the second day. The prize fund was $100,000, including a $30,000 first prize.

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