When The Game Is Over Before It Starts...

The match begins, and Alireza starts the clock. But Magnus is yet to be seen. 30 seconds go by, and there is no sign of him. Then we see Magnus walking to the table. He gives a handshake to Alireza, and then sits down. He is losing time, yet slowly puts away the mask and his badge. He fixes up the pieces, and finally moves E4. By this point, he has lost more than a minute of his time. This, for Magnus' standards, is quite normal. He arrives late sometimes, but what happens next shocked everyone. Alireza moves C6, and now Magnus starts thinking. This is the second move, and waiting this long is very unusual for rapid chess matches. Usually in chess, grandmasters rush in their openings so that they have more time to calculate on the later parts of the game. But Magnus doesn't do that here. Is he genuinely unprepared, or is he calculating something big? Alireza is probably confused too, and we see him get a bit impatient. 40 seconds go by, and Magnus finally moves pawn D4. Alireza quickly goes D5. Then Magnus starts to think again. 30 seconds go by. A minute passes. Magnus rubs his eyes and continues losing time. Finally, he makes his move, E5. Now if we look at the clock, Magnus is almost three minutes behind, and that is obviously a disadvantage. But in case you are new to chess, what Magnus played is the normal line of Caro-Kann advanced variation. The most played next move is bishop to F5, and that is exactly what Alireza plays in just 5 seconds. Now it's even more confusing why Magnus was thinking for so long. Then suddenly Magnus picks up the pace. He goes pawn C4, and Alireza is a bit surprised. He spends 20 seconds, then moves pawn to E6. Alireza didn't spend that time for nothing. C4, which Magnus played, is not the standard line. A normal move would have been knight F3, pawn H4, knight C3, or knight D2. That would account for 88% of games played with his opening. C4, on the other hand, accounts for 3% of games played. Of course, Alireza knows the next moves in the opening, but everything signals to him that Magnus was preparing for something. And he was right. On the 6th move, Magnus once again plays something unusual. Pawn H3. The most popular moves would have been A3, knight E2, or knight to F3. Alireza, of course, responds with knight D7, and then Magnus goes knight F3. Alireza steps back with bishop, and then Magnus starts thinking again for about 2 minutes. Nothing about this makes sense for a rapid match. But then he plays pawn B3. And this is important, because now we are entering middle game, and there are literally no games in the database to have been in this current position. This is what Magnus was planning all along, forcing Alireza into a heavy calculation match. But with 3 minutes behind, could this actually backfire on him? For a while, both players continue to play the best moves, but then we reach a crucial point with move 22. And Alireza is the first one to make a mistake. Hold on. Why did Alireza play so fast? And why does Magnus have almost 8 minutes on the clock, while Alireza has less than 2? You see, this can only mean one thing. Magnus and Alireza both played the best moves, but Magnus was on a completely different level. While he didn't plan everything, those 3 minutes that he spent were probably enough to drive the game where he wanted it to go. Since Alireza would spend time thinking, that gave Magnus the chance to be fast and put even more pressure on him. Magnus' plan worked, and on move 53, Alireza resigns.