The final of the 2022 Charity Cup will be played between GM Magnus Carlsen and GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda, the Polish player who ended Carlsen’s 125-game unbeaten streak in October 2020 and who eliminated the world champion from the 2021 FIDE World Cup.

Duda was too strong for GM Le Quang Liem whereas Carlsen defeated GM Ding Liren in the semifinals. The final starts on Friday at at 9 a.m. PT / 18:00 CET.

Carlsen-Ding 3-1

Carlsen took revenge over his loss vs. Ding in the preliminaries in what was a tense semifinal that started with two hard-fought draws. The world champion then opened the score in a complicated queen endgame in game three.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this author can’t help but signalling that this happened a few minutes before 9 p.m. in Norway and 4 a.m. in Beijing. Let’s hope Ding has dark curtains and is able to sleep until late in the mornings…

Carlsen didn’t have serious problems in his last black game and even won it after a big blunder by Ding at the very end. Nonetheless, the world champion said about his opponent: “He’s clearly the best player who’s not in the Candidates at the moment… except for me, maybe! Whether that means he deserves it, that’s a lot harder to say.”

Duda-Le 2.5-1.5

Le had shown formidable chess thus far and continued playing well on the sixth day of the event, but the 2021 World Cup winner was just a bit stronger. Duda managed to win the first game with the black pieces (from a clearly worse endgame) and then held on with two draws.

All Games Day 6

The 2022 Champions Chess Tour’s Charity Cup Masters runs March 19-27 on chess24. The preliminary phase is a 16-player rapid (15+10) round-robin. The top eight players advance to a knockout that consists of one four-game rapid match during the quarterfinals and semifinals and two four-game rapid matches during the final. Play advance to blitz (5+3) and armageddon (White has five minutes, Black has four with no increment) tiebreaks only if a knockout match ends in a tie. The total prize fund of the event is $150,000, with $750 for each win and $250 for each draw in the preliminaries.

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