MAGNUS CARLSEN; HISTORIC 3400 ELO

Ladies and gentlemen, on this channel I cover a lot of things that Magnus Carlsen does in the chess world. And the reason for that is he has been the best player in the world for a decade and a half, and there is a strong case to be made that he will go down as the greatest player of all time. But every now and then, he still finds a way to do something so interesting and dominant, I have to feature it. There's literally nothing I can do. And that's what I'm going to be doing today. I'm recording this on August 20th, 2025. If you're watching this in the future, hopefully cars are flying, we can talk to dogs, all that good stuff. Yesterday, August 19th, 2025, Magnus played two tournaments on Chess.com. Each tournament was 11 games. He won them both. He lost only one game. He got 10.5 out of 11, and 10 out of 11. He beat Hikaru Nakamura, the second best player in the world, twice. He beat his archnemesis, Hans Niemann. He won an unbelievable game against the former World Championship challenger, Jan Nepomniachtchi. I mean, the list goes on and on. And I just want to show you these games. They were unbelievable games. And he's approaching 3400 Elo on Chess.com. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy these games. And as a bonus, I'll even show you the game at the end where he lost. Imagine Magnus played 22 games in one day, and only one person managed to defeat him. I will show you who that was. And that was an unbelievable game. We kick things off here with the game against Hikaru, okay? Now, here's the best part. That was a big intro. You're a minute and a half into this video. Here's the best part. Magnus played the freaking Polish opening. The other name for this opening is the orangutan, because you have to have the intellectual capabilities of an orangutan to play the move b4 on the first move. It's not a particularly good move. It's not a horrible move. And Magnus was choosing his openings by rolling a pair of dice. He was rolling a pair of dice to determine the openings that he was going to play. Bro, this man is bored, man. He's bored. He's prestiged like in Call of Duty. He's lapping the field. He plays b4. Hikaru plays in the most principled way. If your dummy opponent doesn't take the center, you got to put two pawns in the center, and then you got to support those pawns. Now, the way Magnus creates a game anyway is by playing c4. Kind of like a queen's gambit. Kind of like a drunk queen's gambit. You know, c4. Pawn takes on c4, and now he's going to win the pawn back with the move e3, and he's ready to take on the c4 square. Hikaru can defend the pawn, and he does. But very quickly, his knight is deflected. This is amazing. The way Magnus plays these weird openings and positions, and yet still always has resources to undermine and get over here, it reminds me of... There's a martial art where you act drunk. Or maybe you actually are drunk and fight, like Jean-Charles Skarbowsky or whoever that guy is. But like, yeah. I mean, queen e7. Take, take, take. Castles. I mean, Hikaru's position is still very good. Good pawn in the center, looking to get the bishop out to the g4 square, right? d3. Okay, solid. Hikaru's like, my opponent's king is in the middle, and like Levi says in his YouTube videos, when your opponent has left their king in the middle of the board, you should, you know, you should strike. Unfortunately, Hikaru doesn't watch the videos till the end, where I say, you know, not always. Obviously, he's got to learn from the channel. Knight takes e4. Magnus plays queen c2. Hikaru goes bishop f5, setting up an attack on the queen. The bishop comes back to defend. We have bishop g6. At some point, Magnus is going to have to castle. And this is the game after 15 moves. Totally equal. A little bit of a strange opening. Black has a very compact and solid structure, but he is kind of a pawn down on the other side of the board. 4-3. Okay, so how do you play against somebody who's rated 3381? That's a big rating, right? Bring your rook to the middle. So does the other guy. You go knight d4, just kind of jumping into the middle of the board. The other guy pins your knight to your bishop. You go here, weakening your position a little bit, but making it difficult for Hikaru. Hikaru goes knight f6. Bishop takes. He trades the bishop, right? Gives it away. e4, solid. Replacing the light squared bishop with a set of light squared pawns. Black is slightly better. But if you put this position into a computer, it wants Hikaru to almost do nothing. It wants him to very slowly build up just the right type of position, and then strike. Hikaru plays c5 right away, so he's kind of leaving these pawns behind, helping them kind of advance this one and kick the knight out of the middle. Magnus goes knight e2, and after literally, and I literally mean literally, one pawn capture. One. Just one pawn capture on the 21st move, and this position, now Magnus is playing for a win. I know it's ridiculous. You're like, what are you talking about? No, it's like, yeah, from this position is where it begins, because he has one on two. It's a redundancy, right? He basically has a pawn majority. So now what's going to happen is he's going to send the game into an endgame. You are, I mean, you're grappling one of the most dangerous grapplers in the world. That's what you're doing. It's a nightmare, right? Rook c8, knight b5. Now Hikaru, to his credit, excellent defender, uses his flank pawn perfectly. Beautiful counterplay. Rook d5 gives away his knight while the other knight is hanging. Magnus has to send the game into a rook endgame, and the position is equal, but it's an endgame where your double pawns don't feel particularly inspiring. You know, he's going to win that one. He's going to win this one, because how on earth do you defend it? You don't have x-ray vision, so you're going to end up giving it away, and this is the position you have to defend with 30 seconds on the clock. Yes, the computer says it's equal, of course. I get it, but it's not about that. In fact, I think chess should have an eval bar that says probability of victory, and given the time on the clock in the player, black's chance of survival here is something like 20% max. 80% white is going to win. Four out of five games, Magnus is going to win this with white, and dare I say he might watch this recap and say that it would be higher than that. He might be insulted by the fact that I said it's only 80%, and just watch as Hikaru does his best. I mean, you're not even going to understand where he made a mistake. Look, all of a sudden, you know, he's just checking him. Watch this. How did the eval just go to 2.4? Yeah, basically here, instead of moving his king back one square, literally changing nothing, what Hikaru needed to do was move his rook back so that if the king approached him, I guess he always had front checks. He needed to keep a distance from the king, and when the king went to e3, he would check it and try to say, I don't even know how to explain this stuff, and Magnus obviously breaks through and gets the winning endgame, which is a two on zero, and advances, and Hikaru's rook is stuck behind the pawn. Worst case, you know, stuck, you can't move. If you go to g1, I take, and I'm just going to go g4, and I'm going to push my pawns, and I win the game. Like, how the? What? Bro, he played the orangutan. He played b4 a3. Now, next game, Hans Niemann, and then I got a game against Nipomniachtchi, and then I got another game against Hikaru. Bro beat Hikaru twice in title Tuesday in the same day. I'm not sure how many people have done that. It might be like two or three, but yeah, let's watch the Hans game. You know, Hans very often puts a lot of pressure on Magnus. He's even had him totally bet the rights in some games. Magnus playing the modern. This is the opening that he plays when he's looking for a fight. It's a very interesting opening. I also really like to play the modern. Hans plays it in a very, very, very solid way, like c3, h3. You know, Magnus attacks the center with e5. Hans doesn't even push. He ends up pushing when he basically has no other options. He goes d5, and the game becomes a King's Indian. I mean, it's basically, you know, the position is a King's Indian, except it took White a little bit of time to get there. a5, very natural move, right? And here, Black is going to try to play Na6 and Nc5. Nc3, Na6. Hans plays a3. We have Bd7, just kind of a waiting move, and also taking a little bit of space on that side of the board. And now h6. Very cagey. I mean, if you're trying to beat a guy, playing the King's Indian defense is really what you got to do, because everything is on the board. Everything. The consequences of moving a pawn or a piece in the King's Indian are massive. Rb1. That might not look like it, but obviously, you know, every move has an idea. Now Magnus plays Nh7. Nh7 has two ideas. The first idea is obviously to mobilize your f-pawn. The second idea, sometimes, is actually to use the knight and to, like, chop it into the position. It's a very unique idea. Happens in a lot of different Italians, etc. Anyway, pay attention. b4. Magnus understands that as Hans comes down this way, he needs to strike right back. And what's interesting is that he moved the rook away from the defense of the pawn and moved the knight away as well. But just the existence of a fired-up Magnus Carlsen playing for a win, playing inspired chess. Let's see what happens. Hans plays c5. That was the wrong approach. Apparently, he needed to take on f5 first and then play Ne2. I don't know how you do that. I don't know. Okay. c5. Okay. He does this. The second he does this, looking to take, take, open up the position, etc., right? Looking to do all of this. Getting all sorts of stuff going on. I got, I got Benji barking downstairs. Everything. Okay. a takes b4. a takes b4. d takes c5. b takes c5. knight takes c5. Okay. This is everything. Chopping down the whole side of the board. Hans did this on purpose. He goes down a pawn, but he ripped open the side of the board. And now he goes Be3, hitting the knight. Pawn on b7 is a target, right? Magnus plays b6. And there is a golden rule in chess. If you want to attack a guy, like over here, you want the position locked. A King's Indian player thrives in a locked position. This is not a locked position. This is a position where everything has been blown apart. Okay. And you now need to adapt. You have to adjust. Knight goes back to d2. He doesn't take this knight. The best move is knight g5. But Magnus zips this knight back to b7 to then put it on d6. He gets away from Hans. Knight c4. And now f4. And I don't know if you know the moment in Watchmen, I quote it sometimes, there's a moment where he says, you're locked in here with me. Yeah, that's what this is. You're locked in here with me. Hans gives away the bishop. He straight up just sacrifices it because in the King's Indian, if you take a step back, you die. You die. That's what happens. He's going to go queen h4. He's going to go knight g5. Knight g5. Rook f8. f3. Like you just, you will perish. He will sacrifice. You're going to lose. So Hans is like, all right, I don't want to lose. Let's sacrifice the bishop and lose like this. No, he's like, I got to create counterplay, right? And he actually does get some good counterplay. Magnus chooses the wrong thing here. The best move here for white was bishop, for black was sacking the bishop. It was a ridiculous move. Hans gets some good counterplay. Very good practical chances. And immediately he's like, all right, I got to trade Magnus' pieces down, right? Without these pieces, he's not going to be able to mate me. Bishop f8 back. Magnus makes a sharp adjustment to the incoming position. Hans gallops the knight into the e6 square, like this. And now, I told you a long time ago when this happened, knight g5. This is very sophisticated chess. Using that knight now as a defensive measure. Rook to c1. King to g7. Rook c6, queen d4. Already a little bit difficult here. And queen c2. This is under pressure, this, this, this. Rook b8. Hans reacts to the incoming threat of rook to b2. He needed to move his queen. He goes here. The problem with that move is you stop rook b2, but you drastically weaken your eighth or first rank. Queen a1, king h2. Why is it winning? Because he's ready to go hunt down Hans Niemann's king and bring him out by the scruff of the hair. Scruff of the neck? Hair? Doesn't matter. It's game over. Hans goes here. Rook h1. He resigns. King g2. Queen f1. Here. Rook h3 or queen h3 are both checkmate. Out of nowhere. 3-4 moves? Done. Queen d4. Queen d4. Rook b8. Rook b2. Infiltration. Mate. All he needed. All he needed. Now, his game against Jan Nepomniachtchi was also, like, again, he wins games in different ways. Sometimes he defends. Sometimes he grinds an endgame. In this game, Jan Nepomniachtchi gave Magnus a bishop, and he lost the game. And you might think, I mean, he gave him a free bishop. No. No, he just let him have one bishop on the board. Watch. b3, d5. Okay, normal. Nymsa Larsson. Okay. Kind of similar like he played against Tikaru, except he had pawns like this. Doesn't, again, none of that really matters. We trade. Okay. We trade. We trade the bishops. You know, Black has a very solid good position. Develops his knight over here. Magnus has bishop back to e2. And here, Jan struggled a little bit to move, because if he plays bishop to d7, I'm gonna go here, and then I'm gonna put my rooks on the open lines. If you go to f5, which looks like a very nice square, I always have moves like knight d4, knight h4 to hunt down the knight, as well as h3, g4, just kind of, and g5 using this pin. So, you know what Jan does? He's like, you know, my bishop is a problem. I get rid of it. I go here. When I told you as the introductory comments to this game that he gave him a bishop, and that bishop literally caused him to lose the game, that's what I mean. White has an advantage of bishop versus knight, and that is why this is as big as it is. Plus one. It's also because the queen is on a much worse square than this queen, and white has very clear open lines to target the black queen and target this pawn. In the long run, the advantage is so substantial, it's nearly plus one. Again, you look at the time control, you look at how much time white is also up, win probability here is probably also 70 to 80 percent for white. Queen to d7. He develops the rook with a tempo, and then develops the knight, and attacks the pieces right away. Now, look. Look at this, right? Now, Nepo is one of the trickiest defenders in the world. He's also very fast. He's very frustrating to play, because he's very sharp. Very sharp. He's going to be very good at playing quickly, catching up on the clock. h5, right? h5, nice move. Knight d5. Queen e5. Tricky. Giving up a pawn. That pawn is hanging. Queen e5, but then he wants to get in with his knights, and he wants to attack the stuff. Magnus trades, and grabs the pawn. Calls the bluff. Jan's a little bit of a poker player when it comes to his chess. Rook e8. And now he goes rook d1. And, like, it's kind of crazy, because, you know, Jan decided to go here to trade the queens and get counterplay. Or maybe he just blundered the e7 pawn. I mean, I really don't know that. He could have probably started with the rook to e8. But, you know, he might have went here trading, and then just gave away this pawn by accident. But, yeah, that's, I mean, that's all you need, right? And now we have an extra pawn and a bishop. And we will just convert b5. Pawn takes. Let's kick out the knight. Let's bring the king. Nice idea to trade pieces. We want to simplify to a winning endgame. Now we don't, and now all the pawns are on light squares. So you know what's going to happen in the long run. We're going to get our bishop to attack those pawns. There it is. It's targeting. We also want to trade. We want to trade into an endgame. He's not trading with us. Okay, now we have a lot of threats, like knight e5, bishop f7, right? We bring our king, and they are still all on light squares. At some point Nepo goes here, and yeah, you're, I mean, you're just going to end up losing one of the pawns. That's exactly what happens. Magnus still maintains an advantage. His bishop survived the entire game. His pawn survived the entire game. And the bishop is the hero with the fork at the end. I mean, like, dude, you straight up gave the guy a bishop, and it terrorized you for the entire game. For 44 more moves. It's just wild. Like, he traded this bishop, and that was all Magnus needed. Like, the combined pressure on the queen side with the knight and everything, and that's how people blunder against him. I mean, they really just do. Now, I'm going to show you the next game he played against Hikaru. Hikaru was flabbergasted about this game. He could not believe it. Magnus played a few moves in this game in a scramble, which again, we haven't had any scrambles yet. We had a convincing win in an endgame against Hikaru, a back-and-forth game against Nieman, king's Indian game, and a kind of relatively routine, straightforward kind of middle game, endgame conversion. Now, this game was crazy. So first of all, Magnus played the Scandinavian, which is awesome. We don't get to see that very often, right? He plays c6, completely normal move, bringing the queen back. Hikaru targeted his queen. Magnus said, you don't have any threats. e6, Nf3, all normal. Nd7, all normal, right? Everything is good. Nf6, and Nf6, I think, is a mistake. I think black here has to play bishop to b4 straight away, because white has this move, d5. Now, you're threatening to take and attack the queen. After takes, takes, Qc5. The best move here for white is b4, but you need to, or Be3, I think, even. But not the move Hikaru played. I think either of these moves, oh no, Be3 is wrong, because after Qa5, there is a repetition. But b4, yes, b4 is important. And then after this, you take, and then you go here, and you have to know this whole line. Hikaru goes here first, and now he's not able to play it, and now we have a completely, you know, normal and back-and-forth game. Now, let's watch Magnus win a second game against Hikaru, which very few people can say a6, good move, limiting the bishop, and also potentially, in the future, looking to play b5. Rd1, that move is self-explanatory. He didn't castle, though, which is interesting. You know, if he castled, he might have come under fire on this side of the board. Okay, he goes here, Be7, castles, Rg8. So, it's either clear Magnus is leaving the king in the middle of the board, or he's going to long castle into open space. Bf4, Bg4, okay, nice improvement. Also, queen can rotate, very important. Qe4, you can rotate the queen, but you have to be careful about b7. Wow! Waving the flag in front of the bull, Hikaru can now go b4, and he does. And Magnus hangs around. So, he's worse. He's under a lot of pressure. The best move here for white is to take a moment to acknowledge this threat. He does. Now, there is just a sniper. The black king has no legal moves. Knight on a7 is mate. It's not possible, can't teleport, right? Nb6. Bb3 here wins for white. It wins for white because you trade the rook, and then you take on h7. A little hard to do. Instead, we have Qf4 looking for a very direct assault. But here comes e5, and Hikaru must have thought, after this, he's completely winning. After something takes on d1, which it did, and now Ng6 with Qc7 mate is gg. Ng6 simultaneously threatens Nxe7, Qc7, Qb8, it's all crushing. But he took here, and Magnus immediately, using the rook and defending the position, and we scramble into something that resembles, you know, the weirdest position you've ever seen. One guy has a rook, the other guy does not. Magnus Carlsen has three seconds on the clock. This is the position. The material count, if you count it, is equal. Hikaru has a bishop and two pawns. Black has an extra rook. This bishop is targeted. There are 3.6 seconds on the clock for Magnus. Every time you make a move, you gain a second. He takes the bishop, we have pawn takes here, and the king runs to hide. Hikaru can now have a selection of pawns to choose from with the bishop, but his king is a little bit weak, so he moves it over. Magnus immediately blocks the middle. Queen goes to e5. He plays f6. He plays this move with 0.7 seconds on the clock. Queen check. He blocks with the queen. Knight c5, disconnecting. Magnus has two and a half seconds. He finds the only move. Knight back to e7. Hitting the queen, defended by the queen. Queen e4. He finds, again, the only move. Knight to g6, blocking the attack on the pawn. The bishop goes to d5. It's very clear White is moments away from knocking on the door. Most people here blunder. They see the threats. They play rook to b8, blundering into a fork. And if you don't defend the pawn, you're going to lose this pawn and this pawn, and then get mated. With three seconds on the clock, Magnus finds the best move in 0.4 seconds. f5, counterattacking the queen, deflecting it from the target of b7, and you cannot take this because then I would come back with my knight and win your bishop by forking you. So Hikaru, scrambling, plays queen e6. A losing move because now there's rook d6. Tough to see that. Magnus trades, breathes a sigh of relief, and now goes to work in an endgame. But he's the only one on the board with a rook. A rook is the best type of endgame piece on a board like this. He's going to start grabbing some pawns pretty soon. He's going to start bothering those queen-side pawns. Hikaru tries to push those pawns out of danger, but he's walking them to their death. Knight d7, and now both guys have about 5-6 seconds on the clock. King goes back to a8. Knight d5, the pawns are falling, and within a few moves, Magnus consolidates the position, kicks the knight out of the position completely, goes after the bishop, and once he's going to pick it up, the rook swings over, the queen-side pawns are going to fall. Hikaru moves a few pieces around because you never know if Magnus's internet is going to go out, but I think Scandinavia has pretty good internet, and he resigns because this is the end of the game. The pawn is simply going to promote. Unreal to clutch that game in that type of a scramble against the best, you know, Hikaru's not the best scramble player in the world. I think right now the consensus is Ali Reza Firuja is the best scramble player in the world. Crazy. So how do you beat Magnus Carlsen when he's playing like this? Finding f5, knight e7, knight g6, all these absurd moves with two seconds on the clock, you call the madman. Arjun Aragicy. If Magnus Carlsen is Batman, I know they call me Batman of Chess because Gotham, but if Magnus Carlsen is the Batman of Chess, the Joker is Arjun Aragicy. The man who uses school buses to rob a bank, right? The one who's interested in explosions and fireworks. Arjun Aragicy puts on in this game a banger, a certified FDA-approved banger, all right? Watch. First of all, my boy pulls up with the Jobava London, all right? Knight c3, bishop f4. Within the first 8-9 moves, he's playing g4. Full steam ahead at Magnus. g4, looking for just a full knockout. Magnus meets his energy, h6. Arjun removes the knight and brings the queen out. Okay, very nice. All these ideas are on the table. Nice attacking position, something Arjun definitely really, really likes, okay? e6, solid. Long castle, sliding the king over for a good measure. Position is equal, but there's plenty of life in the game. Rook c8. What's interesting is that the rook can't go to b8, which is really uncomfortable for black somehow, but b4 maybe was the best move right away. Okay, bishop d3. All normal stuff. Now Magnus plays b4, pushing the knight backwards and trades this very powerful bishop. So for a brief moment, black's pawn structure is compromised. It's not very pretty, but the attack for white is sort of gone. You're not going to checkmate anybody without a light h4. No, no. The madman does what he wants. Queen b6, knight c1. Knight c1 is a very nice move. It's ready to go here and put pressure. It's also ready to go here. Long-term endgame advantage. Also ready to jump back into the middle. Queen c6. He defends. Bishop to e7. The attack is not done. The attack is done when Aragicy says it's done. You go 20 moves into this game, folks. Aragicy has a very strong initiative and a very powerful attack against Magnus. This is who you gotta call, man. You gotta call. He's crazy. Aragicy's crazy. So he attacks the knight, forcing Magnus to come up with the best defensive move. Pawn takes pawn. Hitting the bishop. We have pawn takes g5. The rooks are seeing each other. Rook h1, rook h1. Man, it's crazy. Magnus' king is just stuck in the middle of the board. Bishop g5. Bishop takes. Knight takes. So Aragicy right now is a pawn down. Does it feel like that? No! King's got nobody. All the pieces abandoned him. This king is super safe with the knight. These pawns aren't doing anything. So Aragicy's still absolutely attacking. The queen goes to c4. You play rook h8. King here. Look at how well-timed everything is in Aragicy's position. b3. Great move. The queen has to go. Now there's no back rank problems. Queen c3. Take, take. Knight b4. It's almost like Magnus is playing white. Transitioning between the different phases of the game. The opening middle game. Attack positional, right? Here actually, I think even the best move was knight b4 immediately winning on the spot. Because then after rook takes rook, you play knight takes d5 with a pin. But he mixes the move order. But okay, he's still better. King f6. Queen b5. Magnus is losing. But he's not going to go down without a fight. In comes the queen. Queen b6. The king runs forward. Oh my goodness. Arjun wants a queen trade. Magnus grabs the pawn on f3. Arjun goes a4. I mean, what else are you going to do? There's no more attack. Black's king is out in the open. You attack the king. He ran. He ran from the castle. a4. Four more squares to go until we make a queen. Let it be known who's stopping us. White defends every square. This knight is not doing anything. It tries to jump into the middle. Aragicy goes queen c7. We give a check. King a2. f6. Aragicy plays knight back to d3. This is a ridiculous position. Now Magnus is pushing his pawn and defending his king. a5. The best move here is queen to g1 targeting this pawn. Magnus goes here. Now he's losing because of queen h7. Aragicy needs to find queen h7 and he wins. He misses it because he's trying to defend his king. Knight e4. Queen here. Queen here. And now folks, may I show you the purest form of fun in chess. The pawn race. Four queens. I told you this is the only way to beat Magnus. You want to beat Magnus in a game of chess? You gotta get a little bit wild. They both have a queen on the board. So with queen h8 played, you are kind of in a spot of mutually assured destruction. Black could play knight g5 here. Stomp this check. Stomp this check. Stomp this check. But Magnus is like, yo, hold up. Queen h2. I'm having a little bit too much fun. No queens. Aragicy is like, I'm gonna get another one. Bro just can't have enough. You're b5, b6. Queen a8 check. King to b1. And that apparently was the losing move. Queen a8. He needed to start with knight to d2 so that the king would not be able to run from the edge of the board. But he does this and now the king is safe. And it looks like there are still problems. But he's gonna make another queen and yet it's still not over. He's still posing problems. Aragicy now in panic mode trying to give a million checks to Magnus. He gives 750 checks and he ends up losing his knight. Queen a7. Queen b6. Queen a7. Queen b6. Check. Gets to go here and straight up loses the knight. Oh my goodness. But it's not enough. And ultimately here the way you win with white is you don't get mated. You don't panic. You try to find a moment to get a queen trade. Black is now completely defenseless. Queen d8. And on the 74th move of the game after guaranteeing a queen trade, Magnus Carlsen resigned. And that was the only game that he lost that day. And he still won the tournament. Dude's approaching 3400. He sweeps two tournaments. Beats Hikaru twice in the same day. Also beat a bunch of other strongguard masters like Jeffrey Xiong. Haowen Xu from China. And yeah he beat Aragicy in the first tournament of the day. 22 games. One loss. Like 19 wins. Two draws maybe. Crazy. Very impressive. I'm not really sure what else I can say. Get out of here.